The verb wonento live is usually combined with a locational PP, as in (75).

However, the verb wonen can also be accompanied by an adjective phrase, in which case the adjective typically denotes a characteristic of the house or environment in which the subject of the clause lives. For example, (76a) expresses that Jan has a comfortable/small/cozy house and (76b) expresses that he lives in a beautiful/rural environment. Occasionally, the adjective simply indicates a place and is thus functionally equivalent to a locational PP: (76c) does not express that Jan lives in a high/low house or environment, but that his apartment is on a high/low floor in a building.

The syntactic function of the PPs and APs in (75) and (76) is not immediately clear. They are often dubbed complements, because the verb cannot normally occur without them, but it may be that they are simply adverbial phrases and that their obligatory presence is due to the fact that the thought expressed is simply not sufficiently informative without the information they provide; cf. Section V3.2.2.4 for evidence supporting the adverbial analysis. Note that this pragmatic account is not restricted to the cases with wonen, but can also apply to the cases in (77): the sentence Jan is geborenJan is born would be uninformative (unless Jan is a newborn baby) and therefore requires additional information in order to be felicitously used, which is expressed here by an adverbial PP and what is probably a supplementive adjective.

The adverbial phrases in (78) are of a very special kind; they involve adjectives that enter the syntactic frame in het + A. A typical feature of these examples is that they contain the article-like element het, whereas in their English counterparts the adjective is usually bare. The complement of the preposition in therefore looks like a noun phrase in Dutch, but this may only be apparent, since the phrases het algemeen (lit.: the general) and het bijzonder (lit.: the particular) cannot be used in other NP-positions.

A second reason for querying that the complement of the preposition is a regular noun phrase is that the adjective is usually affixed with -e if a definite noun phrase does not contain an overt noun; cf. Section 27.4. This is shown in (79). The fact that this ending is missing in (78) shows that we are not dealing with N-ellipsis constructions.

The phrases in (78) are more or less fixed in the sense that modification is excluded: nothing can be placed between the preposition in and the element het, and het and the adjective must also be adjacent. However, the set of adjectives that can enter into the construction is quite large. All color adjectives can enter the construction, and it is also quite normal with adjectives such as effenplain, gestreeptstriped and gebloktchecked that refer to a specific design.

A peculiar characteristic of the examples in (80) is that some notion of completeness is implied: for instance, example (80c) with the adjective wit implies that the dress is entirely white, and (80a) even implies that Marie’s dress and main accessories are white. However, the notion of completeness is absent when the color adjectives are replaced by measure adjectives like langlong and kortshort, as in (81).

Sometimes it is not easy to determine whether we are dealing with the in het + A construction or a regular PP with a nominal complement. For example, in (82) geheimsecret could in principle be either an adjective or a noun. Since a locational interpretation is not plausible, we can decide that it is an adjective here, which would also be consistent with the fact that the article the is missing in its English counterpart in secret; note in passing that English also has the expression on the sly, in which sly is clearly adjectival (p.c. Carole Boster).

The lexical item nauwnarrow (space) can also be interpreted as either an adjective or a noun. Since the verb drijvendrive in (83a) requires a locational complement in the presence of an accusative object, we should conclude that we are dealing with a regular (metaphorically used) locational PP and consequently with a regular noun phrase het nauw. This conclusion seems to be supported by example (83b); like drijven in (83a), the verb trekkento pull requires a locational phrase, and the adjectives belachelijk and absurd are adorned with an -e ending, indicating that het belachelijke and het absurde are noun phrases with an elided noun; cf. Section 27.4, sub II. Note that in the English translation of (83a), the article the/a must be present.

For the examples in (84) it is not easy to decide whether they are nouns or adjectives. The element kladdraft in (84a) is probably a noun, since it cannot occur in attributive or complementive position, while netneat is probably an adjective, since it cannot occur in regular NP-positions (with the intended meaning); Engels in (84b) can be used both as a noun and as an adjective.

Example (85) provides some other possible cases of the in het + A construction.

Since adjectives cannot normally be used in combination with an article, one might be tempted to consider the relevant instantiations of the in het + A construction as idioms, but the productivity of the construction seems to contradict this. We leave further discussion of the internal structure of the construction to future research.