nciples. Thus, the complement is closest to the head noun, i.e. sister of the N, and the adjunct is sister of the N’. Another reason for which it is advantageous to distinguish between a complement and adjunct is that this distinction enables us to account for the distributional properties of PPs in terms of their status either as complements or as adjuncts. (Class notes) Firstly, it is only possible to have one complement in a phrase: the governor of Texas vs. *the governor of Texas of California is ungrammatical. Secondly, it is possible to have more than one adjunct, e.g. the governor with grey hair with fat hands in the car. Thirdly, the complement always precedes the adjunct. It is acceptable to have the governor with long eyelashes in the car, but not *the governor in the car with long eyelashes. Fourthly, when substituting the proform one, it must refer to both the head and the complement. When asking, “Which governor?” the answer, the one with long eyelashes in the corner is acceptable, but *the one of Texas is not. Finally, it is only possible to coordinate either adjuncts or complements together, not one of each, as is seen in the following examples: The vendor of fruits and vegetables, The vender with blond hair and blue eyes, *The vendor with blond hair and of vegetables.In addition to enabling us to describe formally the occurrence of nominal postmodifiers, X-bar syntax has also enables us to describe the occurrence of premodifiers. Just as in the case of postmodifiers, premodifiers are optional. We can divide Nominal premodifiers into three different classes, i.e. Determiners, Attributes and Complements. Attributes are simply prenominal Adjuncts (Radford, p. 197) and premodifier Complements perform the same function as postmodifier Complements. This can be seen by comparing the structures of the following phrases:(1) A student of Linguistics at Readingvs.(2) A Reading Linguistics studentIn (1...
