It's always a pleasure to read Martha Kolln's savvy and lucid analyses. I
agree (absolutely!) with her definition of absolutes, which would exclude
Ed Vavra's example. They're called absolutes because they are free and
independent of the main subject/verb/object clause. "Absolute" comes from
the Latin absolvere, to set free.

Martha felt it necessary to complicate Ed's analysis in the name of
accuracy. Even Martha's solid analysis, below, might be further
complicated, for the same reason.

At 03:20 PM 12/31/00 -0500, Martha Kolln wrote:
>...In my grammar text Understanding English Grammar (with co-author Bob Funk),
>two of the ten patterns describe sentences with object complements, those
>in which the obj.comps are noun phrases and those in which they are
>adjectives--i.e., nominals and adjectivals.  Quirk et al. call these
>patterns Complex Transitive.  Here are some of their examples:
>         The music drives me mad.
>         They named the ship Zeus
>         I heard someone shouting. (cf. They saw the soldiers marching)
>
>The object complement both modifies (or renames) the direct object and
>completes the verb/object connection.....

The "complication" is that the first two sentences (The music drives me
mad, They named the ship Zeus) are somewhat different in structure from the
last two (I heard someone shouting, They saw the soldiers marching).

In the first two sentences, it's clear that "me" and "the ship" are direct
objects, with "mad" and "Zeus" as complements, but it isn't as obvious that
"someone" and "the soldiers" are direct objects in the other two sentences.
To see why, consider the following sentences :

         He wanted the boss fired.
         She likes everyone having a good time at her parties.

The question arises whether we can consider "the boss" and "everyone" to be
direct objects in these sentences. After all, the sentences aren't saying
that he wants "the boss" or that she likes "everyone." What he wants is an
entire (but reduced) clause, that "the boss (be) fired." Likewise what she
likes is that "everyone (be) having a good time at her parties."

The first two sentences that Martha cites might be said to have deep
structures somewhat like the following, with a direct object in the main
clause:

         The music drives me [I be mad]
         They named the ship [the ship be Zeus]

However, each of the other sentences has an entire clause as the direct
object in its deep structure:

         I heard [someone be shouting]
         They saw [the soldiers be marching]
         He wanted [the boss be fired]
         She likes [everyone be having a good time at her parties]

Many linguists, including me, would claim that the subjects of these
direct-object clauses are then "raised" to become the direct objects of the
main clauses. There's syntactic evidence for this, since we'd say "I heard
him shouting" and not "I heard she shouting."

So, yes, although they have different deep structures, all the sentences
that Martha cites do have noun phrases as direct objects, as she states.
Her analysis is solid, and she wisely kept it as simple as it needs to be
for student discussion.

But for those who love playing with these things, there are further
complications to keep us busy.

Dick Veit
UNCW

Discovering English Grammar: http://www.uncwil.edu/people/veit/DEG/