Nouns and their prepositional phrase complements in English

This paper concerns one aspect of work in progress on a PhD thesis on the complementation of nouns in English (See Bowen (forthcoming)). The purpose of the thesis is to give a description of nouns and their complements which will prove of interest to linguists but will also be of interest, from a pedagogical point of view, to learners of English. Although there are extensive surveys of the noun phrase and its integral parts in grammars and research alike, the complementation of nouns is often only discussed in connection with verb and adjective complementation. Recent traditional grammars, Greenbaum (1996) for example, discuss noun complementation more fully. Biber et. al. (1999:604656) discuss the different structural types of post-nominal patterns including: that-complement clauses, exemplified here in (1); to-infinitival complement clauses shown in example (2); whcomplement clauses shown in (3) and of + -ing constructions shown in example (4). Further, in Biber et. al. (1999:634), prepositional phrases are included in postmodification and dealt with separately. In the present study, however, the term complement is used to denote the postnominal elements which are bound elements selected by a head noun, including both clausal complements as in examples (1) (3) and prepositional phrase complements (PPC) as in examples (4) (7):