In this paper, we report on the development and use of a lexical database to develop a lexicon-grammar of predicative nouns in English. This database allows for linking a verbal construction to an equivalent nominal construction. This tool facilitates the prediction of the structure of the correlated predicate noun phrase(s) and its dependent prepositional noun phrase(s) that take an argument role: subject and possible complement(s). We also show the interest of designing a database in order to explore, infer and register other noun phrase constructions which are not directly correlated with verbal constructions.