Bill,
   The argument for "at 5:00" being sometimes adjectival was mine. To me,
adjectival means primarily modifying a noun (or better yet,
participating within a noun phrase, as constituent element.) We could
say "The meeting at 5:00 is cancelled", and in this case "at 5:00" is
clearly part of the subject, not the predicate, so calling it adverbial
would mean>calling it an adveribal modifier of NP "the meeting", which
bothers me. The same would be true of "the 5 o'clock meeting", or
"tomorrow's meeting", and so on. It seems clear to me that place and
time are very central to the usual building of meaning in noun phrase
constructions. They come in as determiners, as noun modifiers, in
postnominal modifier slots, and so on. So maybe that means the
prepositional phrase "modifiers" are just being moved to the complement
slot? Tonight's game is a home game." "Tonight's game is home." "The
next home game is tonight." There are, of course, highly pragmatic
reasons for doing this, with the complement slot being the position of
high stress and generally new (or unknown) information. "When's the
next home game." "The next home game is tonight." "Where is tonight's
game?" "Tonight's game is at home."
   I think we sometimes get carried away with applying technical terms
when their usefulness may be suspect. But, to me, the prime
distincition between complement and adjunct is whether the element is
part of the core of the clause or is a more optional element. Once we
determine that it's a core element, we can make a second distinction
about how it functions.
   Richard pointed out a clear difference between prepositional phrases as
complements and prepositional phrases as modifiers, with movability a
big test. The difference seems to me both semantic and grammatical.
   "Last week, we scheduled the meeting for 4 o'clock." "Last week" tells
us when the scheduling act happened, so it's adverbial in all the
conventional ways. "At 4 o'clock", though, tells us when the meeting
will happen. It acts very much like the complement in a copular clause:
"The meeting is at 4 o'clock." It adds an element of causality. The
meeting is at 4 o'clock precisely because we scheduled it that way.
   The verb "Schedule" allows these complements, whereas many other verbs
do not. "Last week, we hoped the meeting for 4 o'clock." That's not a
semantic stretch, but it seems grammatically awkward.
   When we give a precise description of what is happening in these
sentences, the use of a term like "adverbial" becomes less important.
Do we want to use adverbial for all time and place meanings? I don't
think so.
  To me, it makes perfect sense to say that an adverbial complement acts
differently from an adverbial adjunct (or modifier). I can extend
adverbial that way, but I can also understand why someome would balk at
that.

Craig

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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