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In English, you can use two determiners with a single noun phrase by using an "of" construction of some sort. Take for example:

Some dogs
The dogs
*Some the dogs
Some of the dogs

This can also apply to saxon genitives as well.

Adam's socks
Many socks
*Many Adam's socks
Many of Adam's socks

(An additional construction, "Adam's many socks" is also possible but this has a totally different semantic meaning from the above example. Here it sounds like you're talking about all of Adam's socks, as well as saying he has a lot of them.)

The caveat is that there seems to be a strict order in which the double determiners can occur, and only one determiner of each type (quantificational, genitive specifier, article), with an exception for recursive saxon genitives as in "Sweden's King's Crown." As well, genitives cannot be used in a double construction with articles: *"The of Adam's socks" and *"Adam's of the socks" sounds just plain silly.


My questions are as such: Is there a name for this type of 'of' construction in stacking multiple determiners onto a single noun phrase? Do any languages other than English allow for analogous constructions? Are there totally different syntactic structures that exist that can perform the same function in more exotic languages?

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I would just consider those normal partitive constructions. Not a version of double-stacking.

[Some [dogs]]
[Some [of [the dogs]]]

[Many [dogs]]
[Many [of [the dogs]]]

In each example the quantifier + of construction signifies some part of a whole (the dogs).

In English it seems that we can only have partitives of definite nouns; i.e. you can have Some of the dogs but you can't have *Some of dogs.

This explains why you can only use quantifiers that can denote a partitive sense for this construction, like some and many and few, and not articles or possessives or other adjectives.

I would prefer this analysis especially because you can double-stack, like Adam's many dogs. You can't double-stack some, however, (*Adam's some dogs), but that's probably because some already denotes a partitive sense. Without the of, though, some can just mean "a few" or somesuch.

I'm not so sure. "All" and "none" can be stacked, as can the non-quantifier "each." "Each dog" and "Every dog" is synonymous, but with "each" you can make constructions like "Each of my dogs."

Secondly, you can make constructions like "Part of a dog" so I'm not sure if these things are restricted to definites.



"Many" and "Few" can be used as adjectives in this sense and yet they also denote partitive relationships. I think the "many" in "Adam's many dogs" and "Many of Adam's dogs" should be counted as two totally separate lexical entries rather than a single entry that is somehow capable of doing both.

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You're just now figuring this out?

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All, none, and each are quantifiers. And synonymous words don't necessarily need to act the same way.

"Part of a dog" can be explained away because part is a noun; going by my analysis, nouns work differently (which makes sense, as nouns of a completely different lexical category).



That may be, but I don't see how that affects my analysis.

This is what I thought.