The complementation of nouns is discussed in Chapter 15; much attention will be paid to various types of deverbal nouns, because the morphological process of nominalization usually involves inheritance of the argument structure of the input verb/adjective. This is illustrated in (2) for a nominal infinitive and a deverbal noun derived by affixation with –ing.

The modification of nouns is discussed in Chapter 16. Section 16.1 will first discuss the distinction between restrictive and non-restrictive modification, and Sections 16.2 and 16.3 will then discuss premodification by attributively used adjectives such as mooibeautiful in (3a), and postmodification by PPs such as op de hoekat the corner in (3b). However, by far the largest part of Section 16.3 will be devoted to NPs modified by a relative clause.

Chapter 17 concludes the discussion of the NP domain with a discussion of binominal constructions such as een emmer perena bucket [of] pears, i.e. noun phrases containing sequences of more than one noun.

Chapter 18 begins the discussion of the functional domain of the noun phrase with a discussion of the determiners. We will show that the determiners can be divided into at least the following subcategories: articles, demonstrative pronouns, and possessive pronouns. According to some researchers, the personal pronouns can also be considered determiners, so we will include them in this chapter.

After the discussion of the syntactic and semantic properties of articles in Section 18.1, Section 18.2 presents a novel categorization of pronouns based on a strict separation of syntactic and semantic criteria, and provides a detailed description of the three main categories: personal, possessive, and demonstrative pronouns. There are good reasons to consider relative pronouns as determiners as well, but for practical reasons we will not discuss them in this chapter, but in Section 16.3.2 on relative clauses. Referential, reflexive, and reciprocal pronouns can, and sometimes must, have an antecedent within their sentence. A satisfactory introduction to such pronouns should therefore pay attention to the syntactic constraints on their interpretation, as it is not the case that they can be coreferential with just any noun phrase in the sentence. This will not be done in Section 18.2 on pronouns, but in Chapter 22, which provides a detailed discussion of the so-called binding theory, which formulates the syntactic restrictions on the use of referential personal pronouns within a single sentence, including the well-known observation that referential and complex reflexive personal pronouns like hemhim and zichzelfhimself are usually in complementary distribution; this is illustrated by the examples in (5), where italics indicate coreference between the reflexive/referential pronoun and its intended antecedent, the proper noun Jan.

Chapter 19 continues with a discussion of cardinal and ordinal numerals such as drie/derdethree/third and quantifiers like sommigesome and alleall. This chapter also provides a discussion of so-called quantitative er, which triggers the elision of the NP-part of noun phrases containing a numeral/quantifier; this is illustrated in example (6).

Chapter 20 concludes the discussion of the internal organization of noun phrases with a discussion of the so-called predeterminers alall and heelwhole in noun phrases like al de boekenall the books and heel de wereldthe whole world.