Hi All --

I'm in the phase of my grammar class that involves dealing with clause
patterns. I give my students a list of the basics, and then (of course)
start fielding questions about exceptions. One issue that I know has
come up on this list, albeit a while ago now, is how to treat the kind
of prepositional phrase that's a required component of sentences such
as, "The meeting is at 5:00." I seem to remember some of the list
members being not too upset at the notion of treating it as a kind of
subject complement (with the proviso, of course, that I may just be
remembering what I want to). Traditionally, prepositional phrases have
not been considered arguments of the verb, and subject complements are
arguments, so there's a principled position against this kind of
treatment -- but if we relax the prohibition against PPs as arguments,
it seems to work fine.  

What kind of approaches are there to dealing with the required
prepositional phrase after 'put'? Is it too far off to consider it an
object complement? This may have come up in the earlier discussion about
linking expressions, but if so, I don't have old enough messages
archived to search through (in other words, sorry if I'm beating a
long-dead horse!). 

Canonical object complements have the same relation to the direct object
that subject complements have to the subject --they're identifying, or
attributive:

	We elected Brunnhild president.	/	Brunnhild is president.
	We consider Brunnhild competent.	/	Brunnhild is
competent.

Based on this, I've started informally calling object complement
constructions "translinking patterns," to try to highlight their
similarities to the linking-verb constructions. Trying this with "put"
seems to produce a parallel result:

	We put the book on the table.		/	The book is on
the table.

Of course, to some extent, trying to treat everything as falling into
one of a few basic patterns is simply an exercise in abstraction; I
don't want to maneuver me or my students into thinking that we're
approaching "reality" this way. However, it does seem to work as an
organizational device. 

Bill Spruiell

Dept. of English
Central Michigan University

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