Noun complements are not [not complements]

Abstract This chapter examines “General Noun-Modifying Clause Constructions” (GNMCCs) and the thesis that verbs and nouns combine with clauses in significantly different ways, with verb phrases embedding either clausal arguments or clausal adjuncts, and nominal phrases embedding only clausal modifiers. Such a claim has been disputed in Huang (2016) with a broad range of arguments from Chinese. The current paper adds much further support for Huang’s line of argumentation with patterns from other languages with head-final NPs, building on Whitman ( 2013 , 2015 ), and Bugaeva and Whitman (2015) . The chapter also considers the proposal, maintained in Arsenjević (2009) , Haegeman (2010) , and Cinque and Krapova (2016) that noun complements may in fact be relative clauses. The chapter shows that shows that noun ‘complement’ CPs are in fact more tightly linked to the nominal head than are relative clauses in the languages under consideration, supporting a different analysis of the position of nominal heads within DPs in (many) head-initial and head-final languages.