It's a simple question but limited to how noun phrases function in English sentences.
Time phrases like last week, are an example of noun phrases functioning adverbially but they are still verb complements.
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1With predicative complements and adverbial phrases, you’ve more or less exhausted the possible roles there are to play… I suppose you could add interjections (“God! Idiot!”). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 1 at 6:27
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1My friends, I feel tired doing someone's easy homework, so I'm leaving. – Yellow Sky Jul 1 at 6:29
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1It's also limited to English, I would suppose. Otherwise, billions of examples come to mind. – user6726 Jul 1 at 13:21
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4Appositives, vocatives, extraposed clauses, demonstratives with gestures, dummy pronouns, ... That's about all I can think of. Degenerate cases, most of them, rather like prepositions are degenerate cases of noun cases. – jlawler Jul 1 at 15:30
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1One must distinguish between predicate noun phrases (like She's a doctor and He's the father of her children) and verbal complement clauses (like the infinitive in She wants Mike to fix the shed and the gerund in Mike enjoys fixing things). Calling something "a predicative complement" muddies the waters considerably. – jlawler Jul 3 at 22:22
Sure. Noun phrases can occur in an adnominal '-s genitive construction:
[the Queen of England]'s hat
Rarely, noun phrases can occur as the complement of certain unusual adjectives:
it was worth [the long wait in line]
conduct unbecoming [a good citizen]
None of the bracketed noun phrases ("the Queen of England('s)", "the long wait in line", and "a good citizen") is the subject of a sentence, the complement of a verb, or the object of a preposition.
