By far the most common quantificational contribution made by post-determiner inflectible heel is that of “totality”. An example such as de stad differs semantically from de hele stad'the whole city' in the same way that their English translations “the city” and “the whole/entire city” differ: de hele stad denotes the totality of the town, the town in its entirety. That heel in its totality sense is quantificational is evident from the fact that it does not combine with helemaal, as seen in (184).

      The totality sense of inflectible heel comes close to that of pre-determiner bare heel discussed in Section 7.2.1.1, which is clear from the fact that it is impossible to combine the two varieties of heel within a single noun phrase.

But despite the close semantic relationship between pre-determiner bare heel and post-determiner heel, there is an important difference between the two. Whereas pre-determiner bare heel forces an exhaustive partitioning of the whole into all of its relevant subparts, no such partitioning is necessarily implied by post-determiner heel (though a partitioning reading seems compatible with post-determiner heel in many cases). As a consequence, some of the semantic anomalies that we found with bare heel dissolve if pre-determiner bare heel is replaced by post-determiner inflectible heel. We illustrate this in the examples below, referring the reader back to the more detailed discussion in Section 7.2.1.
      Consider the examples in (186). What (186a) means is that the entire house has been cleaned from top to bottom, not necessarily that all the individual rooms of the house have been cleaned. As a reflex of this, the cleaning in (186a) need not be directed towards the interior of the house but can also involve the exterior of the house, which would be distinctly odd in the case of Heel het huis is schoongemaakt'All the house has been cleaned' in (168). Similarly, the noun phrases in (186b&c) simply refer to the entire motorboat/house, and, as a result, these examples are perfectly acceptable in contrast to those in (169), where reference is made to all the relevant subparts of the motorboat/house.

The examples in (166) in Section 7.2.1 have shown that pre-determiner heel, as a consequence of the unit feature of its semantics, bars the noun phrases which it quantifies from occurring in distributive contexts. Post-determiner heel does not turn out to be sensitive to this distributivity effect: the examples in (187) are perfectly acceptable due to the fact that heel simply expresses that the predicate affects the referent of the noun phrase in its entirety.

      The examples in (170) have shown that modifiers expressing an exception give rise to a marked result in noun phrases featuring pre-determiner bare heel. Again, we find that post-determiner heel behaves differently: the sentences in (188a&b) are perfectly acceptable with the “except”-clause present. This will be clear from the fact that a Google search (July 2008 ) on the strings [ heel de serie behalve] and [ de hele serie behalve] resulted in, respectively, 1 and 18 hits.

Since post-determiner heel and half do not force a partitioning of the object denoted by the noun they combine with, the friction between “totally affecting” predicates and the pre-determiner half in (172) is lacking in the case of post-determiner half in (189). The examples in (189) simply assert that the predicate expressed by the verb phrase holds for, respectively, a hundred or fifty per cent of the island/village.

The quantificational interpretations in which heel means “total” and half means “fifty per cent of” compete with an alternative reading of these sentences in which heel and half express degree. This reading is discussed in this subsection.