Testing for Complements, copulas

Testing for complements, copulas

adapted from a 22 April, 1997 post by Moreland Clinton Michael

On Tue, 22 Apr 1997, JOEL MATTHEW PEARSON wrote:

She is happy. Happy is an adjunct, because She is. is fine by itself. Or would it be a complement, completing the predicate, because the sense of the word 'is' differs in each case...
I would call "happy" the complement of "is", but the status of copulas like "be", vis a vis complementation, is controversial.

I discussed this with a prof of mine, and we decided that "happy" is the predicate. The "is", as copula, is rather more like the dummy "it" in "It is raining", merely existing to carry tense, number, etc. Thus, this sentence has no complement.

I see Tom. Again, we have a verb with different senses with and without the complement (right?). The valency of the verbs/it's deep case structure is different in each case, so would these be adjuncts or complements? I thought I had it....
"Tom" is the complement of "see". "I see", without any complement, is idiomatic.

It's not idiomatic. What we figured is that this is a case of two different verbs, one transitive, and one intransitive. The deep structure arguments/valency of the two verbs differ, and dropping the complement is in actuality a reversion to a different verb (one that's been modified, or whatever, to lessen it's valency).

These examples show that, in practice, the optionality rule of thumb is a rotten way of telling complements and adjuncts apart, so don't rely on it!

Actually, discussing it with my professor made things a little clearer to me, and optionality is still a valid test, if one looks at things this way:

Every head has a valency (in verbs, these are indicated by intransitive, transitive, ditransitive, passive, antipassive, etc. For nouns, these are the phrasal parts of the noun phrase. same for prepositions, etc. ). If the argument (the phrase, sunject, object, what have you) is required by the valency in order to make a valid sentence, then the phrase is a complement. If not, then it's an adjunct. Adjuncts, then, can act as complements, but they do not necessarily have to stay that way. For example:

I require food and shelter to live.
- Require is a transitive verb (thus, it's valency is two, requiring subject and object), so "I" and "food" are complements. The phrase "to live" as an adverbial, is an adjunct.
I need to live.
- - "Need" is transitive, but here, the object complement is the adjunct of the previous sentence.

I guess these terms are wholly dependent on the sentence in which the exist. Nothing can be stated as complement or adjunct permanently (especially considering that these are roles within a sentence, and thus can be filled by anything which can fulfill the role.) Does this make sense to you guys?

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