ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at two major form classes, adjectives and prepositions, and the corresponding phrasal categories. Adjective phrases (APs) share the same general characteristics as the other phrasal categories, noun phrase (NP) and verb phrase; the head of the phrasal category, which is obligatory, is the lexical category from which the phrasal category takes its name. APs, and hence adjectives, can occur within the NP as an optional ‘premodifier’ of the head noun. They can also occur after the verb BE in descriptive sentences attributing a ‘quality’ to the subject NP. The most frequent complement for a preposition is an NP. A prepositional phrase can occur as an optional ‘postmodifier’ of the head noun in an NP. Modifiers are generally optional constituents which are syntactically dependent on some head. In NPs, an AP is usually an optional modifier of the obligatory head noun.
