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16.2.Prepositional and nominal complements
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Apart from the nominal head, noun phrases can contain one or more other constituents, which can have different forms (nominal, prepositional or clausal) as well as different functions (complement, modifier or apposition). This section will mainly deal with PPs used as complements, although we will also discuss nominal complements insofar as they alternate with these PP-complements. A general problem is that PP-complements and PP-adjuncts can be difficult to distinguish within the noun phrase, because they have the same forms. Section 16.2.1 therefore discusses some syntactic differences between them and introduces four tests that have been proposed for distinguishing between them. Sections 16.2.2 to 16.2.5 discuss the various types of PP selected by the nouns listed in Table 2, and apply the complement/adjunct tests from 16.2.1 to them to determine whether they can indeed be considered complements of the noun.

Table 2: Types of nouns taking PP-complements
relational nouns (non-derived) Section 16.2.2
derived nouns deverbal nouns er-nominalizations Section 16.2.3.1
inf-nominalizations Section 16.2.3.2
ing-nominalizations Section 16.2.3.3
ge-nominalization Section 16.2.3.4
deadjectival nouns Section 16.2.4
picture nouns (derived/non-derived) Section 16.2.5
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