Part of speech of the word "south"

AlpheccaStars

anonymousOnly nouns take determiners.

Sure, you can force the change to the part of speech by changing the sentence, adding a determiner which is not in the original.

It's not changing the part of speech at all, and the meaning remains the same.

Here, "15 kilometers south of Abbotsford" is a noun phrase with "south" as head. Its function is that of predicative complement of "be", a function filled by a noun or adjective phrase, but not normally by an adverb phrase.

Incidentally, as a preposition, it is used dynamically in examples like "We were travelling east"; in its static use it requires an of phrase complement, as in "It is 50 miles north of Paris".

Despite what dictionaries tell us, "south" is not an adverb.