Vardelm wrote: ↑Tue Jul 27, 2021 12:51 pm
I have to ask, if academic sources aren't even clear or uniform on this, why do we need to require academic sources for this? Yeah, I get the notion of academic vs non-academic sources & their relative value; I just completed grad school, after all!
However, we're not engaged in academic writing here, so I would put value on a source more for its general usefulness than academic merits. Generally, those aren't at odds, but if the academics can't agree on something, I'm not going to worry about whether a description I write will hold up in a peer-reviewed journal.
Mostly, I want these sources because academic linguists tend to be rather good at analysing the structure of language and postulating reasonable categories. Non-linguists, not so much.
bradrn wrote: ↑Tue Jul 27, 2021 9:24 am
For instance, your Cambridge link lists (1) as a subject complement, but (2) as an object:
(1)
He became a famous writer.
(2)
He married a famous writer.
And sure, there is a semantic difference, and this might translate to a syntactic difference in some other language… but the two constructions are exactly parallel in English, and there is no grounds for distinguishing them syntactically.
Do the main predicate verbs involved (become and marry) not indicate a syntactic difference, in that "become" requires a complement, while "marry" allows/requires an object? Why is a syntactic difference even needed here? Are we not allowed to use the descriptors "subject complement" and "object complement" based simply on semantic properties? I mean, is semantics not a scholarly topic and thus doesn't warrant labels? (Yes, I'm exaggerating for effect here.)
Well, this
was originally a question about syntax. But you’re right that that’s not enough of a reason to reject it. More importantly, it just strikes me as a very arbitrary and pointless category to posit. Do ‘subject complements’ share anything in common beyond the definition itself? Does distinguishing ‘subject complements’ from non-‘subject complements’ enlighten us in any way? Does the distinction hold up outside English? If not, it’s a bad category.
I like how
DeLancey (2004) puts it:
DeLancey wrote:
The question is, when we have a workshop on "ergativity" in various languages, are we pursuing a coherent typological phenomenon, or just collecting specimens? Not that there’s anything wrong with collecting and comparing specimens … But when we limit a collection to certain kinds of specimens, there’s a question whether a workshop on "ergativity" is analogous to an effort to collect, say, birds with talons -- an important taxonomic criterion --, birds that swim -- which is taxonomically only marginally relevant, but a very significant functional pattern --, or, say, birds that are blue, which will turn out to be pretty much a useless criterion for any biological purpose.
Vardelm wrote: ↑Tue Jul 27, 2021 12:51 pm
My point about "usefulness" above is that here Wikipedia's description gave a very simple, clear, & easily applicable terminology to explain what's going on. "Subject compliments" describe the subject, while "object compliments" do so for the object. Qwynegold's original question was about complements and objects. It was useful to think in terms of complements as a whole clause/phrase, and that they describe the subject or object. That helped clarify that just because a complement may contain an object, that doesn't mean it's the object for the main predicate verb.
The problem I have with this is that the word ‘complement’ is clearly being used for two completely different things here. Qwynegold’s question about ‘complements’ referred to subordinate clauses embedded in a larger clause as an argument of a verb. ‘Subject’ and ‘object complements’, by contrast, are merely specific types of what us linguists would call noun phrases. There is practically no connection.
bradrn wrote: ↑Tue Jul 27, 2021 9:24 am
Furthermore, not a single one of their ‘subject complements’ are, in fact, a complement clause. For that matter, neither is their example of an ‘object complement’:
He makes me very angry.
Nor are the examples of ‘subject complements’ on Wikipedia — their ‘dependent clause’ is actually a headless relative.
Maybe this SIL article agrees more with your understanding of relatives vs. complements?
https://glossary.sil.org/term/complement-clause
That SIL article agrees with me, in that a complement clause ‘is a notional sentence … that is an argument of a predicate’. (Though their third example is a headless relative, not a complement clause. R.M.W. Dixon calls such things ‘complementation strategies’, though the term sadly is not yet in wide used.)
That article is written rather poorly such that it doesn't clearly distinguish between complements & relatives. It does a bit, but it requires re-reading a couple times. It does mention the irregular usage by academics between relative clauses & complement clauses. I think that shows the distinction between them is a tiny bit murky, and so for people who are new to or struggling with such concepts, it's not absolutely necessary for our purposes. Or, at least at Qwynegold's current stage of developing Omni-kan, it's not necessary. You basically go back to our previous posts and the Wikipedia article and replace "complement" with "relative" if you want, or maybe use them interchangeably. Academically correct? Nope; don't care too much at this point. Instead, it's for clarifying the issue at hand: a main predicate's object vs an object in a complement.
Sorry, but I’m totally lost here… which article do you mean by ‘that article’? What ‘irregular usage’? How is ‘academically correct’ different from just, well, plain ‘correct’?
bradrn wrote: ↑Tue Jul 27, 2021 9:24 am
All of which just goes to confirm my opinion that most of ‘traditional grammar’ is rubbish.
Bob? Is that you?
Not at all. As far as I’m aware, I’m still bradrn. (Unless someone has taken over my mind without me knowing, of course.)
I should note it’s important to differentiate between ‘traditional grammar’ and the formalisms of modern linguistics—‘Basic Linguistic Theory’, as some people are starting to call it. The former was originally created for Latin by native speakers and scholars, and was then (mis)applied to most European languages in general and English in particular. The problem is, Latin syntax is quite different to English syntax, so various parts of English syntax ended up being shoehorned into bits of Latin grammar which seemed to express approximately the same thing. This is why terms like ‘adverb’ and ‘infinitive’ and, yes, ‘subject complement’ have ended up so ambiguous and difficult to understand.
(By the way, it’s also where rules like ‘no prepositions at the end of a sentence’ come from. In Latin, such constructions are ungrammatical. Ergo they must of course be ungrammatical in English as well! ‘Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn’t always beat actual thought’—Terry Pratchett.)
)
How is "turn back the clock" describing the subject?