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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.
For these actants, the verb has a greater or lesser number of bonds that maintain the actants as dependents. The number of bonds that a verb has constitutes what we will call the valence of the verb. Tesnière used the word actants to mean what are now widely called arguments (and sometimes complements).
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 ...
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 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 ).
The first English grammar, Bref Grammar for English by William Bullokar, published in 1586, does not use the term "auxiliary" but says: All other verbs are called verbs-neuters-un-perfect because they require the infinitive mood of another verb to express their signification of meaning perfectly: and be these, may, can, might or mought, could, would, should, must, ought, and sometimes, will ...
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)
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.