For anyone who is interested in such things, a while back I placed
copies of Reed & Kellogg's _Graded Lessons in English_ and _Higher
Lessons in English_ in the Project Gutenberg archive, which makes them
available for easy searching of such terms.
A quick check shows that R&K actually _do_ use the term "complement,"
and mean it in more or less the way that linguists still do (required
elements after a verb). But they call the subject complement an
"attribute complement." They also use the term "object complement," but
mean the direct object. See lessons 28 & 29 of _Higher Lessons_. They
mention the terms "predicate noun" and "predicate adjective" but don't
make much of them.
Karl Hagen
Department of English
Mount St. Mary's College
Spruiell, William C wrote:
> Herb,
>
> There’s a historical reason, I think, for the differential treatment
> of these in the RK system. I’m going on memory here (I can’t get to an
> actual copy of Reed and Kellogg until tomorrow), so my argument should
> be viewed as a bit suspect, but I **think** I’m right on it. The kind
> of traditional grammar that R&K used did not typically use the term
> ‘subject complement’ – instead, it used ‘predicate nominative’ and
> ‘predicate adjective.’ These terms were tied to prevailing theories
> about the (semantic and grammatical) nature of predication. AdvPs are
> neither predicate nominatives nor predicate adjectives, so they
> couldn’t appear as such. Likewise, I think traditional RKesque systems
> would treat “I sent the children upstairs” as being a resequencing of
> “I sent upstairs the children”; complements in the system could only
> be nominal (= predication of identity) or adjectival (= predication of
> quality). That isn’t a reason for confining ourselves to such a view,
> of course, but the AdvP-as-SC-or-OC analysis would constitute a
> revision to the system, not an option already in it.
>
> That last point raises an issue I’m undecided-but-curious about (this
> is off-topic but I think it might be productive to discuss). In a
> sentence such as, “The meeting is on Thursday,” why would I have to
> consider the prepositional phrase adverbial? That’s what RK does, and
> Martha’s sentence type taxonomy does it as well (the impression I got
> was that the taxonomy was designed to fit as easily as possible with
> traditional school grammars, which either implicitly or explicitly
> tend to hew to the “predicate nominative vs. predicate adjective”
> dichotomy). I would see no problem with considering it an adjectival
> prepositional phrase in complement position.
>
> Trying to apply that to “I sent the children upstairs” causes a
> problem, though. One could view that sentence as being roughly
> equivalent to either of these two:
>
> I caused the children to be upstairs.
>
> I caused the children to go upstairs.
>
> If I want to view an OC as being related to the DO in about the same
> way the SC is related to the S, I could preserve my adjectival reading
> of it with the “be” paraphrase (they are now upstairs children, not
> downstairs children), but not the “go” paraphrase. Of course, I’d
> rather deal with all this by having recourse to finer-grained
> taxonomies of sentence types anyway. But it’s a thought.
>
> Bill Spruiell
>
> Dept. of English
>
> Central Michigan University
>
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