Any taxonomy of sentence types (and therefore complement types) that
tries to limit itself to a reasonable number of categories is going to
"miss" a certain amount of detail. For example, in most sentence-type
systems, it's very difficult to deal with sentences with 'put' - it
*requires* an object and a prepositional phrase after it, but we have no
official category for the prepositional phrase (normal PP adjuncts are
optional, but it's hard to argue that the PP with 'put' isn't a
complement of some sort). We could make up a category like
"Translocative sentences," and give the PP a label ("locative
complement"?), but at the risk of making the system too cumbersome to be
useful to users. 

I would view "They ate the fish raw" as one of these cases of a "minor
sentence type" that is clearly different from the canonical categories,
but infrequent, so it's not pedagogically worthwhile to make up new
labels for it (if we go that route, we'll end up with the 150+ basic
sentence types of English). I'd go ahead and call 'raw' an object
complement (it clearly describes the object), but I'd admit it's a
fringe-y one.

That's a "pedagogical" answer, though -- from a theoretical standpoint,
I'm not averse to the idea that the number of fine-grained sentence
types in the language is a multiple of its verbs. 

--- Bill Spruiell

Dept. of English
Central Michigan University

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