Verbs (V), nouns (N), adjectives (A) and prepositions (P) constitute the four major word classes. The Syntax of Dutch is organized around these so-called lexical heads; the remaining word classes, the so-called functional heads (such as complementizers and determiners), are discussed in relation to these lexical heads. The third part of the Syntax of Dutch deals with adjectives and their projections, i.e. adjective phrases (APs), and is organized as follows.

Chapter 23 begins with an overview of some of the syntactic, morphological, and semantic characteristics of this word class. Like the other word classes, adjectives can project in the sense that they can select complements and can be modified by adverbial phrases; this will be discussed in Chapter 24 and Chapter 25, respectively.

Chapter 26 discusses comparative and superlative formation and argues that this can also be seen as involving projection.

Chapter 27 through Chapter 30 will take a closer look at the syntactic uses of the AP; we will successively discuss its attributive, predicative, partitive genitive, and adverbial uses.

Chapter 31 will discuss the adjectival use of present/past participles and modal infinitives; example (4) provides some cases in which these forms are used in attributive position. Note that the term modal is used here because the infinitive is deontic in the sense that it expresses some notion of “ability” or “obligation”; example (4c) refers to a book that must be read for some reason.