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– The main verb help is the complement of the auxiliary verb, will. Chris gave up. – The particle up is the complement of the verb gave. as a friend – The noun phrase a friend is the complement of the preposition, as. Construed in the broad sense, many complements cannot be understood as arguments.
In traditional grammar and guide books, a linking verb is a verb that describes the subject by connecting it to a predicate adjective or predicate noun (collectively known as subject complements). [1] Linking verbs include copulas such as the English verb be and its various forms, as well as verbs of perception such as look, sound, or taste and ...
In grammar, an object complement is a predicative expression that follows a direct object of an attributive ditransitive verb or resultative verb and that complements the direct object of the sentence by describing it. [1] [2] [3] Object complements are constituents of the predicate. Noun phrases and adjective phrases most frequently function ...
Complement (linguistics), a word or phrase having a particular syntactic role Subject complement, a word or phrase adding to a clause's subject after a linking verb; Phonetic complement; Complementary, a type of opposite in lexical semantics (sometimes called an antonym)
Tesnière used the word actants to mean what are now widely called arguments (and sometimes complements). An important aspect of Tesnière's understanding of valency was that the subject is an actant (=argument, complement) of the verb in the same manner that the object is. [9]
Verbs are used in certain patterns which require the presence of specific arguments in the form of objects and other complements of particular types. (A given verb may be usable in one or more of these patterns.) A verb with a direct object is called a transitive verb. Some transitive verbs have an indirect object in addition to the direct object.
The word copula derives from the Latin noun for a "link" or "tie" that connects two different things. [1] [2] A copula is often a verb or a verb-like word, though this is not universally the case. [3] A verb that is a copula is sometimes called a copulative or copular verb.
The plural verb were agrees with the post-verb noun phrase two lizards, which suggests that two lizards is the subject. But since two lizards follows the verb, one might view it as being located inside the verb phrase, which means it should count as the object.