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An -ing form is termed gerund when it behaves as a verb within a clause (so that it may be modified by an adverb or have an object); but the resulting clause as a whole (sometimes consisting of only one word, the gerund itself) functions as a noun within the larger sentence. For example, consider the sentence "Eating this cake is easy."
Sentence 1 is an example of a simple sentence. Sentence 2 is compound because "so" is considered a coordinating conjunction in English, and sentence 3 is complex. Sentence 4 is compound-complex (also known as complex-compound). Example 5 is a sentence fragment. I like trains. I don't know how to bake, so I buy my bread already made.
The object complement is bold in the following examples: She painted the barn red. – Adjective as object complement; Here, painted is an attributive ditransitive verb. The direct object is the barn. The object complement construction allows for the combination of the sentences She painted the barn and The barn was painted red. He considers ...
In those examples, the subject and object arguments are taken to be complements. In this area, the terms complement and argument thus overlap in meaning and use. Note that this practice takes a subject complement to be something very different from the subject complements of traditional grammar, which are predicative expressions, as just ...
For example, the noun aerobics has given rise to the adjective aerobicized. [3] Words combine to form phrases. A phrase typically serves the same function as a word from some particular word class. [3] For example, my very good friend Peter is a phrase that can be used in a sentence as if it were a noun, and is therefore called a noun phrase.
The presence of complements depends on the pattern followed by the verb (for example, whether it is a transitive verb, i.e. one taking a direct object). A given verb may allow a number of possible patterns (for example, the verb write may be either transitive, as in He writes letters , or intransitive, as in He writes often ).
Being a verb, an infinitive may take objects and other complements and modifiers to form a verb phrase (called an infinitive phrase). Like other non-finite verb forms (like participles , converbs , gerunds and gerundives ), infinitives do not generally have an expressed subject ; thus an infinitive verb phrase also constitutes a complete non ...
An example appears in the sentence He deserves to win the cup, where "deserve" is a catenative verb which can be followed directly by another verb, in this case a to-infinitive construction. [ 1 ] These verbs are called "catenative" because of their ability to form chains in catenative constructions.