Bill,
I don't have a problem with calling "at 5:00" both adverbial, since it
is temporal, and a subject complement, since it adds information about a
subject just as
Craig's a grammarian.
The meeting is only for senior staff.
The meeting was too long.
etc.
I have iffy reactions to moving locative/temporal complements too.
Five hours the meeting lasted
is okay, but
Five hours were lasted by the meeting
is horrendous.
I think part of the problem with "On the table, I put a book" and "On
the table was put a book." has to do with the pragmatics. Compare
On the table, I put a book, a writing pad, and a glass of wine; on the
floor, I put a basket of magazines.
or
On the table had been put a book, a writing pad, and a glass of wine.
both of which feel fine.
Herb
Herb and Karl,
My memories of the "The meeting is at 5:00" thread from months ago is
that the potential adjectival status of "at 5:00" had arisen (again, I
may be guilty of a highly selective memory!). One school of thought was
that time/space information like this was adverbial, while another was
that information about a noun (in this case) was adjectival, even if the
information itself had to do with time or space. Karl's call for
terminological clarity holds for those examples as well. I'm not sure I
can dodge use of "adverbial" as a label in this particular class,
though. And I'm using "adjunct" for optional, moveable elements, so
"predicate adjunct" is a problem. "At 5:00, the meeting was" is just as
poetic (or clumsy, or Yoda-ish) as "An engineer, Bjorn was." And of
course, you can't leave the predicate adjunct out -- so I have trouble
calling it an adjunct.
Prying at the "put" construction a bit more, I found myself trying to
sort out my reactions to possible permutations: "On the table, I put a
book" and "On the table was put a book." The second sounds awful, at
least to me (I did a Google search for instances of "was put"; the only
early hits with initial prepositional phrases were from linguistics
articles. They were being heavily starred as ungrammatical, or being
used as paraphrases of a construction in some African languages). It
would sound slightly better with "placed," although I'm not sure how to
interpret what that might suggest.
The "On the table, I put a book" type doesn't sound *as* off to me,
though. I'm worried I might be suffering from Linguists' Syndrome, that
disorder that causes constructions that one has been looking at too long
to seem oddly grammatical, or oddly ungrammatical (not the *other*
Linguists' Syndrome that causes one to become fascinated with odd points
of usage).
Bill Spruiell
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Stahlke, Herbert F.W.
Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2006 2:05 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: What to do with 'put' [PPs following linking verbs]
Bill,
I'm one of those who has never been bothered by complements that were
not noun phrases or adjective phrases. As Kent puts it, it's important
to distinguish form and function here, and complement/adjunct is both a
functional and a formal distinction, formal in the sense of how one or
the other can move in the sentence and functional in the sense of how
SC, OC, and Loc play a modifying role, SCs modifying the subject, OCs
the DO, and Locs the verb. That one or any of these may be adverbial or
adjectival in function is simply not a problem.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Spruiell, William C
Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2006 12:28 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: What to do with 'put' [PPs following linking verbs]
Martha,
That clears things up for me -- I knew I was misreading you, but
couldn't figure out in which wrong direction I'd gone.
There's a classic grammatical "fork in the road" with these
constructions, it seems -- if adverbials can't be complements, then [S
BE ADV] can't involve a subject complement, and thus its [BE] can't be
linking. That's both internally consistent and consistent with
traditional grammatical treatments, but I keep wondering how much damage
it would do to consider status as an adverbial as not ruling out status
as a complement. If I've understood some of the other posters correctly,
"adverbial complement" is not automatically an oxymoron. Accepting the
idea of adverbial complements does necessitate making a strong
distinction between "adverbial," in general, and "adjuncts" in
particular, since then only some adverbials would be adjuncts.
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Martha Kolln
Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2006 5:40 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: What to do with 'put' [PPs following linking verbs]
Bill and Craig,
My use of the word "intransitive" was misleading--because I certainly
don't consider "be" a member of the intransitive family. As I
mentioned, I separate "be" from the other verb classes(linking,
intransitive, and transitive)--and give it three different sentence
patterns in my scheme of ten patterns: one is "be" with the ADV of
time or place; one with the Adjectival as subject complement; and one
with the nominal as subject complement. (I also have two patterns
for linking verbs determined by the form of the subject complement
and two for the object complement patterns.) I have no problem in
thinking of the ADV, whether prepositional phrase or simple adverb,
as a complement in the "completer" sense of the word. I do consider
it adverbial, however, and diagram it in that way (as you know, the
R&K diagrams, which I use, distinguish a subject complement from an
adverbial). So I do want to differentiate the adverbial from the
subject complement--and thus give be + ADV a pattern of its own.
When verbs are classified as linking, transitive, or intransitive
(and, as Herb includes, intransitive + locative), the linking
category includes "be." In that scheme, NP + be + ADV is considered
linking. It really gets left out because "linking" assumes the
presence of a subject complement, and I don't think the ADV
qualifies. When I called it the "intransitive be," I simply meant
that, like intransitive verbs, it has no direct object or subject
complement.
Martha
>Hi folks --
>
>I'm adding a few notes below (in my unfortunately-common "I can't
>organize these, so here's a numbered list" format), but first, I'd like
>to thank everyone for the feedback -- it's enormously useful. Figuring
>out a good pedagogic "balancing point" on the amount of detail is not
an
>easy thing.
>
>(1) The complement/adjunct distinction is obviously of primary
>importance, as Bob and Karl both point out. The reason I bring in
>clause patterns is that the course, as it's currently designed,
>is partly devoted to familiarizing students with common grammar
>terminology, so I need some
> way of getting to "direct object," "indirect object," and
>"subject
> complement." In terms of usage rules, though, only "subject
> complement vs. any kind of object" is relevant, since that
>affects
> pronoun choice in formal writing. Were I focusing on
>copy-editing
> only, I'd probably just skip direct vs. indirect objects
>altogether. Were I doing an introduction to English syntax, I'd
>focus more on the range of variation and then skip specific labels
>(since there would be too many types). In other words, some of my
>decisions here have to be motivated directly by the master syllabus for
>the course.
>
>(2) Based on Miller's notion of "The magic number seven, plus or
>minus two," Herb's list of types seems to hit the sweet spot dead on.
>
>(3) Martha -- I'm not sure how to interpret your phrase about "the
>'be' version of intransitive verbs." It's certainly the case that it
>acts
> like an auxiliary rather than the main verb (e.g., you just move
>it
> to make a y/n question rather than having to add a DO form ("Was
>the
> meeting at 5:00? Did the meeting seem boring?"). It's in a frame
> (for want of a better word) that canonical linking verbs usually
>go
> in, though. I typically call these "subject complement
>constructions,"
> which might let me dodge the issue entirely -- but only if the
> time/place PP can be called a subject complement.
>
>(4) One of my students earlier, trying (I think) to refer to
>intransitive verbs, asked if one of the class examples included an
>"intransigent verb." Is there a term for a misapprehension whose
>result is better
> than the original? Can one have a beneprop?
>
>And again, thanks for the feedback! -- Bill Spruiell
>
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