In this paper, we analyze two types of nominal constructions in Romanian: DPs morphologically marked for Genitive and complex DE-phrases. The two types of construction are alike insofar as they involve a relation (which may either pertain to the lexical meaning of the head N or else be contextually triggered by the presence of the second argument), but they differ regarding the nature of the second argument. A strong correlation can be shown to exist between syntactic categories (DPs vs. NPs), syntactic functions (arguments vs. modifiers), Case marking (synthetic vs. analytic) and semantic type (type