SILENTIUM! Silent nouns and the spurious indefinite article in Dutch
There are three constructions in Dutch in which the singular indefinite article `een' shows up even though the noun that follows it is either a plural or a mass noun that should not take any overt article at all. The three constructions are: Wat-voor-questions (roughly corresponding to English what-kind-of-X questions), exclamatives, and the N-van-een-N construction (corresponding to English examples like `a giant of a man'). I will argue that the correct analysis of these construction involves the postulation of silent semi-lexical heads corresonding to the notions TYPE and TOKEN(S) as well as silent functional heads corresponding to NUMBER and DEGREE.