The examples in (208) and (209) illustrate the evaluative use of een in exclamative constructions, which inherently express some evaluation on the part of the speaker, which may be either positive or negative (depending on contextual or extra-linguistic factors). In these examples we are dealing with a spurious indefinite article een, which is clear from the fact that it can be used in combination with plural nouns, as illustrated by the (b)-examples.

If the article is followed by a singular count noun, the evaluation must involve some property of the book, which may be related to its content, its physical properties, its appearance, etc. The same holds for plural nouns, but in this case the evaluation may also involve the number of books.

Perhaps the interrogative wat-voor constructions in (211) can be brought under the same rubric of “evaluativity”, since the speaker is asking the listener for a further characterization of the set denoted by the NP in question. This further characterization can (but need not) be expressed by an evaluative attributive adjective: a typical response to (211a) would be een interessant/saai boekan interesting/boring book, but it could also be een romana novel.

One might also want to include the N of a N construction in (212), where the evaluative part is to be found in the metaphorical comparison that this construction inherently expresses. Note, however, that Section 17.2.1, sub VI, has claimed that for many speakers the use of een in the plural example (212b) leads to a highly marked result and is only acceptable in an evaluative context with a second, obligatory occurrence of a the spurious article een in the first position of the full noun phrase, as in (212c); cf. (210).

This subsection discusses a special use of the definite article, illustrated in (213). This use is easily recognizable by the heavy accent assigned to the article, which is marked in writing by an acute accent on the vowel symbol. Note that stressed de is the only case in Dutch in which a function word with a nucleus schwa receives a heavy accent; the stressed article het is not pronounced with a schwa, but as /hεt/.

The semantics contributed by the definite article in these examples can best be characterized as par excellence; the noun phrase in question refers not just to a specific entity or group of entities, but asserts that the referent is the representative par excellence of the total set denoted by the NP embedded under the determiner.

There is a tendency for definite noun phrases with an emphatically stressed article to function as nominal predicates, as in (213) and the primeless examples in (214), but it is not impossible for them to perform argument functions, as shown by the primed examples.

This emphatic use of the definite article is possible not only with common nouns, but also with proper nouns. An example is given in (215). The reaction to the assertion of the first participant in the discourse expresses disbelief/surprise on the part of the second participant, who asks whether the first participant is really referring to the world-famous lead singer of the Rolling Stones.

The emphatic use of the definite article is not compatible with a generic interpretation of the noun phrase: since generic noun phrases like de zebrathe zebra in (216) do not pick out specific individuals from a larger set (cf. Section 18.1.1.5), they cannot pick out the representative(s) par excellence of that set either. Hence (216b) is unacceptable, in contrast to (216a), which has unstressed de.

Haeseryn et al. (1997) claim that the par-excellence reading can also be obtained by using the stressed second-person singular possessive pronoun je, as in (217). However, these examples with je are neither as common nor as widely accepted as those with de/het. Note that it is very remarkable that the weak form je (with a schwa as the nucleus) can be accented without switching to the strong form jouw, which never allows a par-excellence interpretation.

Although not all speakers accept the par-excellence reading of stressed jé, they all accept the weak possessive pronoun je (as well as the weak article het) on a similar par-excellence reading in the idiomatic expression in (218); assigning stress to je results in unacceptability (although stress can be assigned to het). Note that je/het ware is probably an elided noun; similar non-elided constructions are possible with the nouns levenlife and gelukhappiness.

Finally, it may be interesting to note that the stressed form jé can also be combined with the definite article het to form the highly idiomatic construction in (219), which shares with the earlier examples the par-excellence reading.

Note that we have glossed stressed het as “the” rather than as the pronoun “it”. The reason for this is that hét in (219) violates two otherwise robust properties of pronominal het: its failure to receive accent and its non-occurrence to the right of prepositions. See the discussion of R-pronominalization in Section P36.1: *Ik kijk naar het vs. Ik kijk ernaarI look at it.