What is a Predicative Complement?
Subject-related and Object-related types
Take a look at the following sentences:1
(1) I have known Professor Tyson for approximately a decade and she is a friend. (2019, News on the Web Corpus (NOW) Davies 2016–: US)
(2) The vehicle’s engine became very hot, and Jackson had the electrical system checked. (2016, NOW: New Zealand)
(3) I considered her a friend. (2010, NOW: UK)
(4) Leave it on for 20 minutes, and then rinse it clean. (2022, NOW: buzzfeed)
What grammatical function do we assign to the items shown in bold?
The answer is Predicative Complement. These come in two types. In (1) and (2) the bold phrases function as Subject-related Predicative Complement, whereas those in (3) and (4) function as Object-related Predicative Complement.2
Subject-related Predicative Complements ascribe a property to the Subject of the clause in which occur, and are licensed by copular verbs (also called linking verbs) such as be, become, seem, appear, etc., whereas Object-related Predicative Complements ascribe a property to a Direct Object, and are placed after the Objects of verbs such as consider, deem, appoint, make, as in (3), or verbs that allow the expression of a result, such wipe, scrub, polish, etc., as in (4).
Quirk et al. (1985) and Huddleston and Pullum (2002) refer to the structures with an Object-related Predicative Complement as being complex transitive, and Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 217) refer to the constructions with a Subject-related Predicative Complement as complex intransitive.
Both Subject-related Predicative Complements and Object-related Predicative Complements can be realised as noun phrases and as adjective phrases (and some other phrase types).
Why do we not say that the function of the NP a friend in (1) is a Direct Object? One reason has to do with the nature of the verb be. It does not have a direct semantic link with the NP or AdjP that follows it, in the way that a typical Direct Object has with the verb that precedes it. Put differently, typical Direct Objects are assigned a semantic role (also called thematic role) by the preceding verb, but this is not the case for the units that come after linking verbs. Another reason is that the noun phrase a friend cannot become the Subject of a passive clause.
Let’s now take a closer look at (3). Notice that this sentence does not actually mean that I considered her. What I considered is the proposition ‘She is a friend’. We can paraphrase the sentence as I considered her to be a friend. If we follow this observation through, we might conclude that her does not function as the Direct Object in this sentence. Instead, we can say that the sequence [her a friend] functions as a Complement of the verb. This would then be called a verbless clause or small clause. This notion dates back to the work of linguists Edwin Williams and Tim Stowell in the early 1980s, who were working in Noam Chomsky’s Generative Grammar framework. I discuss small clauses in Aarts (1992).
So, in view of this, what is the correct analysis of examples like (3) and (4), I hear you ask.
This is an area of grammar where both the more traditional analysis, outlined at the beginning of this post, and the generative analysis have their own strengths and weaknesses. You may be surprised to hear that in my Oxford Modern English Grammar I adopt the traditional analysis, but in my textbook English Syntax and Argumentation I adopt the Chomskyan analysis.
Let’s look first at the reasons we might want to adopt the traditional analysis for (3), repeated below:
(3) I considered her a friend.
Notice that the pronoun we have after the verb consider is in the accusative case. This is typical for Direct Objects, and for the Complements of prepositions.
Another consideration with regard to (3) is that we can passivise this sentence:
(5) She was considered a friend by me.
Transforming the Object of an active sentence into the Subject of a passive sentence is a defining characteristic of Objects.
The downside of the traditional analysis is that we have to say that in (3) her is the grammatical Object of consider, despite not having a semantic link with this verb. (We saw above that (3) does not mean that ‘I considered her’, but that I considered the proposition ‘She is a friend’.) This means that the grammatical and semantic analyses of this sentence do not match.
In the small clause analysis grammar and meaning do align: the Complement of the verb consider is the small clause her a friend. But there are some downsides for this analysis too! First of all, the small clause is an odd kind of clause, because it does not contain a verb. And secondly, we have to allow pronominal Subjects of clauses to carry accusative case.
With regard to the latter point, perhaps this isn’t really a problem, because Subjects do not always have nominative case, but can also appear in other cases, as in this example:
I objected [PP to [clause him/his eating chips with his fingers]]
In this example the bracketed unit is a prepositional phrase in which the preposition to takes a nonfinite participial clause as its Complement. The Subject pronoun can appear in the accusative case or in the genitive case.
The complex transitive construction discussed here shows that it’s not always possible to definitively argue for one analysis over another. In a future post I will look at constructions that involve the pattern ‘verb+NP+to-infinitive’, as in I considered her to be a friend, cited above, which have also generated a lot of discussion in the literature.
References
Aarts, Bas (1992) Small Clauses in English: the Non-Verbal Types. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Aarts, Bas (2011) Oxford Modern English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Aarts, Bas (2023) Oblique predicative constructions in English with for and as: qua vs. qualitate qua. English Language and Linguistics 27.4, 773-788. Open access here.
Huddleston, Rodney and Geoffrey Pullum (2002) The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.
Stowell, Timothy (1981) Origins of phrase Structure. PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Williams, Edwin (1975) Predication. Linguistic Inquiry 11.1, 203-238.
Most examples in the Substack post are taken from corpora, large collections of authentic spoken and written data. I’ve used some of the data from Aarts (2023).
I use the terminology from my Oxford Modern English Grammar. We find different labels in Quirk et al. (1985): Subject Complement and Object Complement. Huddleston and Pullum (2002) have Subjective Predicative Complement and Objective Predicative Complement.
God this is hard!
Thank you for another interesting post. Regarding the case of 'her' in 'I considered her a friend', I've always found the argument that we should expect a nominative case pronoun here very odd! Isn't it the case that (1) accusative case is the unmarked case in English and (2) you can't have a nominative case pronoun without a tensed verb in English? Consider two sutdents, one of whom is pointing at her prof: A: 'She's my supervisor'. B: 'Who?' A: 'Her!' We can't have 'she' as A's reply there, because there's no tensed verb. But A could say 'SHE is', for example. So back to 'I consider her a friend', there's no tensed verb and so no possibility of a nomivative pronoun as Subject (assuming it is a Subject)