Relational nouns do not involve an event but an inherent and permanent relation. The relation usually involves two animate entities. In the example below, the noun suster ‘sister’ designates the person who is in the relation of 'being a sister of':

The same remarks apply to the noun boas ‘boss’. A boss is a boss of somebody. Hence we find an example like the following, with a complement inside the complement:

Complements to relational nouns can also be expressed in the possessor position of the noun. Thus alongside (1) we have the following:

In this construction, the possessor is doubled by a possessive pronoun. The stem of the pronoun depends on the sex of the person it refers to, male or female. The conjugation of the pronoun depends on the gender of the following noun, which is feminine, hence the form sien is chosen, and not the masculine form sin. Furthermore, a possessor may be syntactically complex in case it is doubled by a possessive pronoun. A case in point is the following, in which a complex NP is embedded in the possessor position:

A relational noun like suster ‘sister’ differs from an ordinary noun like bouk ‘book’, which does not involve inherent and permanent (inalienable) possession. Other examples of relational nouns may involve a thing and a unique sub-part, as in the examples below:

Another relational noun is Foar ‘father’ or Babe ‘dad’. The latter tends to be specific, to be used for the specific father of a specific person, whereas Foar ‘father’ is more generally used, as in the following:

Thus relational nouns include part-whole relations, including body part relations, family relations, hierarchical relations and so on.

See: the morphology of Saterland Frisian.

See: the morphology of Saterland Frisian.

Picture and story nouns form a subclass of nouns. They do not involve an event or a relation but a created object that may involve a possessor, an agent and a theme. They may be deverbal or de-adjectival, but they need not be so. Picture nouns may have three Adposition Phrases (PPs), a theme, an agent and a possessor, as in the example below:

Each PP is introduced by the preposition fon ‘of’, though the maker of the painting could also have been introduced by the preposition truch ‘by’. Both the agent and the possessor could also have been realised as a NP in the prenominal possessor position. The same remarks apply to story nouns. The following example illustrates that the theme of a story noun can be realised in a PP headed by the preposition fon ‘of’.

It is possible to add PPs to this type of noun as well:

Here the PPs respectively denote the theme, the author, the translator and the possessor of a part-whole relation.