Proceeding from fundamental considerations on grammar research, notably in the sectors of prepositions and noun valency, the study examines a large text corpus with a view to identifying the constructional principles underlying the prepositional attribute. Besides establishing a specific terminology specifically tailored to the topic in hand, the study indicates the demarcation criteria for distinguishing prepositional attributes from neighbouring syntactic constructions and discusses the internal structure of prepositional attribute constructions. At the syntactic level this is done for all prepositions that can function as governed, while at the semantic level the internal structure of selected prepositions is examined.