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– He is the subject complement of the verb wiped. She scoured the tub. – She is the subject complement of the verb scoured. 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 ...
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 ...
In linguistics, valency or valence is the number and type of arguments and complements controlled by a predicate, content verbs being typical predicates. Valency is related, though not identical, to subcategorization and transitivity, which count only object arguments – valency counts all arguments, including the subject.
The word what can be used to form a free relative clause – one that has no antecedent and that serves as a complete noun phrase in itself, as in I like what he likes. The words whatever and whichever can be used similarly, in the role of either pronouns ( whatever he likes ) or determiners ( whatever book he likes ).
The complementizer is often held to be the syntactic head of a full clause, which is therefore often represented by the abbreviation CP (for complementizer phrase).Evidence of the complementizer functioning as the head of its clause includes that it is commonly the last element in a clause in head-final languages like Korean or Japanese in which other heads follow their complements, but it ...
Only sentences with a noun as the complement (e.g., "This is my sister") use the copular verb "to be": 是; shì. This is used frequently; for example, instead of having a verb meaning "to be Chinese", the usual expression is "to be a Chinese person" ( 我 是 中国人 ; 我 是 中國人 ; wǒ shì Zhōngguórén ; lit.
A test to identify whether or not an adverbial phrase is a complement or adjunct is to remove the phrase in question from the sentence. If the sentence no longer makes sense or if its meaning is altered heavily, then the adverbial element is a complement. If the meaning is still intact, it is an adjunct. [14]
Mandarin active voice sentences have the same verb phrase structure as English active voice sentences. There is a common active construction in Mandarin called Ba(把) construction: “Ba” is a verb, not a preposition. It is a three-place predicate that subcategorizes for a subject, an object, and a VP complement. [16]