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2.2.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 be mainly concerned with PP-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 within the noun phrase may be difficult to distinguish because they take the same form. We therefore begin our discussion in Section 2.2.1 by discussing some syntactic differences between them and by introducing four tests that have been proposed for distinguishing between the two. Sections 2.2.2 to 2.2.5 will discuss the various types of PP that are selected by the nouns mentioned in example (53), and apply the complement/adjunct tests from 2.2.1 to these in order to establish that they can indeed be considered complements of the noun.

53
Types of nouns taking PP-complements
relational nouns (non-derived) Section 2.2.2
derived nouns deverbal nouns er-nominalizations Section 2.2.3.1
inf-nominalizations Section 2.2.3.2
ing-nominalizations Section 2.2.3.3
ge-nominalization Section 2.2.3.4
deadjectival nouns Section 2.2.4
picture nouns (derived/non-derived) Section 2.2.5

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