A compound-internal phrasal constituent can only occur in non-head position: if a phrase occurred in the head position, the whole expression would be a phrase, and hence not a compound. Compounding with NPs is a productive pattern and is not restricted to lexicalized NPs. However, not all kinds of NPs can function as compound constituents. It is only the combination of a bare adjective or quantifier with a bare noun that is allowed. Compounds in which one of the constituents of the NP is modified, are impossible, as shown in (4):

This means that it is the morphological module that defines which kind of NPs can occur within compounds. The reasons for this restriction might be at least partially semantic. For instance, the embedded NP cannot be a referring expression, because parts of words cannot have independent reference. Hence, we do not find determiners in compound-internal NPs (though we do find them in clauses embedded in compounds such as ban-de-bom-beweging ban-the-bomb-movement).

A consequence of the possibility of NPs occurring within words is that we find plural nouns within compounds. Examples are the following:

In these examples the head nouns refer to a kind of container or a mass, and thus the use of plural nouns in the non-head position is quite natural.

There are also a number of nominal compounds whose left-hand constituent consists of an NP with a PP-complement:

The nouns involved in such constructions are usually identical. The NPs function as adverbial modifiers.

In addition to NPs, we also find PPs, APs (bare adjectives followed by a complement) and sentences within compounds, sometimes in the form of imperative sentences. Examples are:

A second type of phrases within compounds consists of conjoined phrases: Ns, Vs, and As can be conjoined, with or without a conjunction, as left-hand constituents of compounds:

Asyndetic coordination, that is coordination without an overt conjunction, is found in the left-hand constituents of nominal compounds: