Silent nouns and the spurious indefinite article in Dutch

Abstract

This article discusses the distribution of the so-called spurious indefinite article in Dutch. In a recent presentation, Thomas Leu (2004) has suggested that the occurrence of the spurious article in wat-voor-questions could be linked to the presence of a silent noun. My purpose in the present article is to take up this idea and to examine its viability in two other constructions: exclamatives and the N-of-an-N construction. The discussion supports Leu’s analysis and will shed more light on the phenomenon of silent nouns (cf. Kayne, 2003a, 2003b) and of silent (semi-)lexical heads (cf. Van Riemsdijk, 2002) in general.