For anyone who is interested in such things, a while back I placed 
copies of Reed & Kellogg's _Graded Lessons in English_ and _Higher 
Lessons in English_ in the Project Gutenberg archive, which makes them 
available for easy searching of such terms.

A quick check shows that R&K actually _do_ use the term "complement," 
and mean it in more or less the way that linguists still do (required 
elements after a verb). But they call the subject complement an 
"attribute complement." They also use the term "object complement," but 
mean the direct object. See lessons 28 & 29 of _Higher Lessons_. They 
mention the terms "predicate noun" and "predicate adjective" but don't 
make much of them.

Karl Hagen
Department of English
Mount St. Mary's College

Spruiell, William C wrote:

> Herb,
>
> There’s a historical reason, I think, for the differential treatment 
> of these in the RK system. I’m going on memory here (I can’t get to an 
> actual copy of Reed and Kellogg until tomorrow), so my argument should 
> be viewed as a bit suspect, but I **think** I’m right on it. The kind 
> of traditional grammar that R&K used did not typically use the term 
> ‘subject complement’ – instead, it used ‘predicate nominative’ and 
> ‘predicate adjective.’ These terms were tied to prevailing theories 
> about the (semantic and grammatical) nature of predication. AdvPs are 
> neither predicate nominatives nor predicate adjectives, so they 
> couldn’t appear as such. Likewise, I think traditional RKesque systems 
> would treat “I sent the children upstairs” as being a resequencing of 
> “I sent upstairs the children”; complements in the system could only 
> be nominal (= predication of identity) or adjectival (= predication of 
> quality). That isn’t a reason for confining ourselves to such a view, 
> of course, but the AdvP-as-SC-or-OC analysis would constitute a 
> revision to the system, not an option already in it.
>
> That last point raises an issue I’m undecided-but-curious about (this 
> is off-topic but I think it might be productive to discuss). In a 
> sentence such as, “The meeting is on Thursday,” why would I have to 
> consider the prepositional phrase adverbial? That’s what RK does, and 
> Martha’s sentence type taxonomy does it as well (the impression I got 
> was that the taxonomy was designed to fit as easily as possible with 
> traditional school grammars, which either implicitly or explicitly 
> tend to hew to the “predicate nominative vs. predicate adjective” 
> dichotomy). I would see no problem with considering it an adjectival 
> prepositional phrase in complement position.
>
> Trying to apply that to “I sent the children upstairs” causes a 
> problem, though. One could view that sentence as being roughly 
> equivalent to either of these two:
>
> I caused the children to be upstairs.
>
> I caused the children to go upstairs.
>
> If I want to view an OC as being related to the DO in about the same 
> way the SC is related to the S, I could preserve my adjectival reading 
> of it with the “be” paraphrase (they are now upstairs children, not 
> downstairs children), but not the “go” paraphrase. Of course, I’d 
> rather deal with all this by having recourse to finer-grained 
> taxonomies of sentence types anyway. But it’s a thought.
>
> Bill Spruiell
>
> Dept. of English
>
> Central Michigan University
>
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