Recommendations

Prepositional phrase (PP)

A sequence of a preposition and its complement is a prepositional phrase. The complement of a preposition is usually a noun phrase (see examples 38 to 40), but may also be a clause or an adverb phrase. According to the categories recommended here, a prepositional phrase may be analysed further into preposition and noun phrase. The examples below demonstrate how this further analysis can be a recursive procedure.

(38)  [PP en [NP sustitucion [PP de [NP los canales correspondientes [PP de [NP 50 baudios NP] PP] NP] PP] NP] PP].

(39)  [NP Fairbanks NP] [VP hummed [NP a few bars NP] VP] [PP in [NP a voice [VP made resonant [PP by [NP the very weakness [PP of [NP his chest NP] PP] NP] PP] VP] NP] PP].

(40)  [PP En [NP el caso [PP de [NP un sistema mixto [PP en [NP el [CL que [VP se utilicen [NP canales [PP con [NP tres velocidades [PP de [NP modulacion NP] PP] diferentes NP] PP] NP] VP] CL] NP] PP] NP] PP] NP] PP]

In a language such as Spanish, where a large proportion of the modification of nouns takes the form of a following preposition de and another noun, this recursion is extremely prevalent, as in 40. In cases where the prepositional phrase is complemented by a one word noun phrase, it may be advantageous to leave the analysis at this point, rather than continuing to analyse further by enclosing the complement (see also one-word constituents).