I'm puzzled by the relationship of Cornelia and Deb to marijuana, and what is a "hydroponic quantity"?
One might say the difference in meaning resides in BE, but I think it runs deeper than that. The difference is in the noun mood over against car. Mood designates (inter alia) a static-situational-abstract-object whereas car designates (i.a.) an instrument-inanimate-discrete-concrete-object. This difference in type of the second argument drives the interpretation of the preposition IN, which is called "overloaded" or "underspecified" depending on your point of view. The subject complement in the first case is adverbial in nature describing the modal aspect of the situation (modal). In the second case the adverbial phrase describes local aspect of the situation (local). I think the other ovious possibility in English is a temporal aspect as: "The event is in the evening." It is possible to find other adverbial (situation discriptor) uses of IN; that might make an interesting exercise. I must admit, however, that the overloading of IN cannot hold a candle to that of BE.
If I were forced into our usual categories, I'd say it's just what you called it, a prepositional phrase as subject complement. Short form for "grow operation." Usually an extremely large warehouse set up to grow massive hydroponic quantities of marijuana. I suspect this structure arises for a curious reason. Prepositions and verbs have some things in common. They can both take objects; they both can be transitive or intransitive. How they differ is that verbs can be inflected for tense and, to a limited degree, person and number. Prepositions can't. The consequence is that if the primary predicate of a sentence is the preposition we have to insert a verb, usually some form of BE, to carry the inflection. This is a little clearer if we look at the meaning as a logical structure,
in(Cornelia, bad mood)
If we add tense to that, we could get
PAST(in(Cornelia, bad mood))
This is one of the problems with BE in English. Its meaning is so dependent upon context. A lot of languages, including some dialects of English, dispense with some of these uses of BE.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [
mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Peter Adams
Sent: 2008-05-13 23:56
To:
[log in to unmask]Subject: Prepositional Phrases as Subject Complements
How would you categorize the prep phrase, "in a bad mood," in a
sentence like the following?
Cornelia was in a bad mood.
How about the prep phrase "in her car" in the following sentence?
Deb was in her car.
Peter Adams
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