The category of nominal copulative compounds is productive. Here are some examples:

This type of compounds is not restricted to names for persons, as the following examples show:

There may be more than two constituents, as in hotel-café-restauranthotel-cafe-restaurant.

What is special about such compounds is the semantic relation between the head and the non-head: a tuinman-chauffeur is a chauffeur who is also a gardener. However, the morpho-syntactic properties of such compounds are similar to those of endocentric compounds. For instance, the plural form of tuinman-chauffeur is tuinman-chauffeurs (and not *tuinmannen-chauffeurs, with two plural nouns). The different status of the parts can also be seen in the behaviour of copulative NN- compounds in which the gender of the two constituents differs. In the compound kind-sterchild-star, a star who is still a child (with the plural form kind-sterren), the word ster has common gender, whereas the word kind is a neuter noun. In accordance with the usual right-headedness of Dutch compounds, the complex word as a whole has common gender. Adjectival copulative compounds such as doof-stom deaf-dumb and Duits-Nederlands German-Dutch also behave as one word morphosyntactically. The adjectival inflection, obligatory on adjectives in prenominal position, only appears on the last constituent, hence Duits-Nederlandse betrekkingenGerman-Dutch relations and not *Duitse-Nederlandse betrekkingen.

Compounds like rechter-plaatsvervanger judge-deputydeputy-judge look like copulative compounds, but the second word is semantically a modifier of the first, and does not encode a separate role. Hence, we interpret this compound as a left-headed compound, similar to compounds like secretaris-generaal secretary-general.

A detailed classification of the types of copulative compound occurring in Dutch is provided by Olsen (2001).