Complements in noun phrases?

Abstract Whether pre-nominal clauses in Chinese need to be distinguished into different types has been controversial — should there be a distinction between gapped versus gapless, complement versus adjunct? Some argue that all pre-nominal clauses belong to the same category, like the proposals claiming that they are all relative clauses containing gaps (variables). However, this study highlights clear examples where gaps are syntactically impossible in pre-nominal clauses. These gapless clauses behave differently from the gapped ones, forcing the recognition of different types of pre-nominal clauses. Nonetheless, while the gapless clauses exhibit many characteristics of complements, they are not directly adjacent to the lexical noun (N). Instead, they are related to larger projections containing functional heads above the noun. This finding has important implications for how we define “complements” and how complements differ from non-complement structures.