A MODO DE EJEMPLO

Like flowers, Complements come in various kinds. On one occasion, it may be enough to describe an object as a flower; on another occasion, we may wish to be more specific and refer to it as a rose or jasmine or magnolia. Some people might want to specify what kind of rose they are talking about and so they classify it as a tea rose or a rambling rose. Rose growers may go into even greater refinements of categorization. In the same way, with many gram-matical categories, we can classify items with varying degrees of delicacy.

Though they are less variegated than flowers, Complements are no exception to this tendency. For some purposes, we may be happy with the label Complement; sometimes we may wish to go further and say what kind of Complement we are dealing with.

The Complements (italicized) in the clauses ‘he awoke his wife’; ‘he had written down something of the greatest importance’; ‘he could not decipher his own scrawl’; ‘others depress it’ are all classed, with greater delicacy, as object Complements. Or, at somewhere around the ‘rambling rose’ stage of delicacy, they can be classed as direct object Complements (C^do).

Direct object Complements (C^do) normally follow those verbs listed in dic-tionaries as transitive: decipher, depress, stimulate, from our extract. Verbs marked in the dictionary as intransitive tend to occur without an object Complement. One problem for someone trying to give a neat account of all this is that most verbs in English (not all) seem to be able to function both ‘transi-tively’ and ‘intransi‘transi-tively’; that is, with or without a Complement. For example, in the extract we find both (25) and, a little later, (26) (with C^doin italics):

(25) [. . .] some nerves stimulate an organ and others depress it.

(26) [. . .] some drugs stimulate while others depress.

A Complement which follows a copular verb (such as be, seem, appear, become) is called an intensive Complement (C^int). Examples: Brasilia is the capital city; she seems a brilliant woman; he appears stupid; the terrain even-tually became a desert. The text provides a more complicated example of this in (9), repeated here with added italics.

(9) It was a way of determining whether there is any chemical substance involved in nerve transmission.

To sum up, all the following items are intensive Complements: the capital city, a brilliant woman, stupid, a desert and a way of determining whether there is any chemical substance involved in nerve transmission.

Some verbs allow two object Complements: a direct object Complement and an indirect object Complement (C^io) (see Fig. 3.8). (27) is taken from another chapter of the source text.¹

(27) Mendel promptly sent him 140 packets.

50 Structure of the clause

Here the C^dois 140 packets and the C^iois the pronoun him. The verbs that permit C^io, called ditransitive verbs, are a limited set; typical ones are give, send, offer. In a simple independent declarative clause the C^ionormally comes immediately after the verb and the C^do follows it, as in (27). Such clauses systematically correspond to clauses where the C^doimmediately follows the Predicator and the other Complement is expressed as a prepositional phrase with to. Thus, the author might have written (27a):

(27a) Mendel promptly sent 140 packets to him.

Many linguists reserve the term indirect object for the structure without the preposition. One label that has been applied to the to-phrase in such structures is oblique Complement (C^ob). Some class it as an Adjunct. However, some analysts prefer to apply the term indirect object Complement to both struc-tures, regardless of the form and sequence, which is what we shall do, as in Fig. 3.9.

Complements 51

Mendel promptly sent him 140 packets

S F/P C^io C^do

Fig. 3.8

Mendel promptly sent 140 packets to him

S F/P C^do C^io

Fig. 3.9

Sometimes a C^iocorresponds not to a to-phrase but to a for-phrase, but it is analyzed similarly. For example, in the case of the invented clause (27b), the corresponding clause is (27c).

(27b) Mendel bought him 140 packets.

(27c) Mendel bought 140 packets for him.

A different kind of structure with two Complements is to be found in (28):

(28) Loewi called the substance released by the vagus nerve ‘vagus-stuff’.

There are two Complements here: (i) the substance released by the vagus nerve, and (ii) vagus-stuff. The first is the C^do, but the second is another kind of intensive Complement (C^int), sharing identity with the C^do(see Fig. 3.10).

(Two is the maximum number of Complements that a simple clause can con-tain.)

A standard textbook instance of this type of structure is (29).

(29) They elected him President.

Here him is C^doand President is C^int. Comparable structures in common use are the so-called performative expressions, such as (30), (31) and (32).

(30) I now pronounce you man and wife.

(31) I find you not guilty.

(32) I declare this supermarket open.

A literary example of this structure is the well-known first sentence of the great American novel Moby Dick: ‘Call me Ishmael’ (which because it is imperative lacks a Subject). An old joke plays on the potential ambiguity of such structures:

Hotel guest: Call me a taxi!

Hotel porter: All right, you’re a taxi.

Normally in our analysis we label Complement as C without indicating the more delicate subcategory. Only when the distinction is important for the pur-poses of the discussion do we go into the more delicate analysis.

3.4 Adjuncts

Adjuncts, as their name suggests (etymologically: something ‘joined to’), are slightly peripheral in the clause. The information they give may be just as important as that of S, F, P or C items, but Adjuncts are for the most part grammatically optional in a way that the others are not.

The first sentence in Text 3A begins with an Adjunct: The night before Easter Sunday, 1920. Other Adjuncts in the same sentence are: in the night, with an idea, on a tiny slip of paper and then. (Some analysts might want to add down, but we have decided to place it with the verb as part of the Predicator.) In the following sentences in the same paragraph, we find: again, about six, the next night, at three a.m., and in nerve transmission.

Adjuncts fall into three subtypes: circumstantial, conjunctive and modal, corresponding more or less to the three macrofunctions: experiential, tex-tual and interpersonal. As in the case of Complement, whether or not we need to go into such details depends on the immediate purpose of our analysis. It may be enough to classify an item as Adjunct or we may wish to subclassify it.

52 Structure of the clause

Loewi called the substance ‘vagus-stuff’

S F/P C^do C^int

Fig. 3.10