Complementation

THOMAS EGAN
Hedmark University College, Norway

By “complementation” is meant the process by which a linguistic item is added to another

item which would be syntactically and semantically incomplete without this addition. In
example (1) there are three instances of verbal complementation and one of prepositional
complementation.

(1) She put the cold beer into the fridge yesterday

The verb put requires the presence of a grammatical subject, coding someone who moves
something, a grammatical object, coding something which is moved, and an adverbial, cod-
ing the place to which something is moved. As for the preposition into, it requires the pres-
ence of a nominal, coding some sort of container. The four strings below are thus all ungram-
matical as they stand.

(2) *put the cold beer into the fridge yesterday

(3) *She put into the fridge yesterday
(4) *She put the cold beer yesterday
(5) *She put the cold beer into yesterday

Complementation is to be distinguished from “modification,” which describes the addi-

tion of a noncompulsory item to another item, the meaning of which it nuances in some way
or another. An example of modification is the relationship between the adjective cold and the
noun beer in example (1). Another example of modification is the relationship between the
time adverbial yesterday and the predication of the beer placement. Complementation must
also be distinguished from “determination” which describes the relationship between the
definite article the and the two nouns beer and fridge. Determiners resemble complements
in being sometimes syntactically obligatory (with a singular countable noun in English, for
example) but they are not semantically necessary: that is, she put (the) beer into fridge is per-
fectly understandable, if nonstandard, in a way that examples (2) to (5) are not.
In traditional grammar, complementation was referred to as “government” and was often
contrasted with “agreement.” In languages with case endings an adjective might agree with
a noun it modifies. In other words it is the case of this noun, often called the “head,” that
decides the case ending of the adjective. But the head noun does not decide its own case
ending. This is instead dependent on the relationship between it and a governing item,
for example, whether it is the subject or object of a verb. The next section deals with the
distinction between heads and dependents which is criterial for the distinction between
complementation and modification.

Heads and Dependents

Both complementation and modification comprise a relationship between a more central

member of a phrase, commonly called a head, and one or more ancillary members,
The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, Edited by Carol A. Chapelle.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal1459
2 COMPLEMENTATION

commonly called dependents. Since the distinction between the two types of relation
depends largely on whether or not dependents can be omitted without being recoverable
from the context of discourse, it is clear that the first step in differentiating them involves
distinguishing heads from dependents. Whereas we can rely on the notion of obligatoriness
(or at least latency) to distinguish between complements and modifiers, this criterion is
not applicable to the distinction between heads and dependents, since both of these are
obligatory in many constructions.
Note that there is considerable disagreement among grammarians as to what constitutes
the head of various types of constructions and that this disagreement straddles to some
extent the formal/functional divide. To take just one example, a determiner, like the in the
cold beer, rather than a lexical noun (beer), is taken to be the head of a nominal phrase both in
the formalist minimalist program (Radford, 1997, p. 95) and the functionalist word grammar
of Hudson (Hudson, 2010, p. 289). Within functionalist approaches Dik’s functional gram-
mar (FG) excludes prepositions, like into in into the fridge as heads of phrases (Siewierska,
1991, p. 10), unlike role and reference grammar (RRG; see Van Valin & LaPolla, 1997, p. 52)
and word grammar (Hudson, 2010, p. 287).
Various criteria have been proposed for identifying the heads of constructions. These
include morphological criteria involving case marking in languages which express gov-
ernment and agreement. Syntactic criteria boil down to the notion of “endocentricity,”
introduced by Bloomfield (1935, p. 194) and explained as follows by Hockett (1958),
discussing the sentence the old dog lay in the corner.

Some constructions are such that the form-class of the constitutes [i.e., the con-
structions themselves] is similar to the form-class of at least one of the ICs
[immediate constituents, or the items that make up the constructions]. Here
“similar” means that the two ranges of privileges of occurrence largely overlap.
. . . Any construction which shows the property just described and illustrated
is endocentric. The constituent whose privileges of occurrence are matched by
those of the constitute is the head or center; the other constituent is the attribute.
In old dog, old is attribute and dog is head. (Hockett, 1958, p. 154)

In a more modern formalist terminology one could say that “a noun phrase is a PROJECTION
of its syntactic head. That is, the syntactic head noun ‘projects’ its nouniness onto the whole
phrase” (Payne, 2011, p. 167). In example (1) one could substitute beer for the phrase the cold
beer and still end up with an acceptable English sentence. In the terminology of cognitive
grammar (CG; see Langacker, 2008, p. 193) the head is called the “profile determinant” of
the construction. The profile of into the fridge is a relationship of “into-ness” rather than
“fridge-ness.” Therefore into rather than fridge (or the) is said to determine the profile of
the phrase. Croft (2001, pp. 246–59) discusses various syntactic criteria for establishing the
heads of constructions and concludes that none of these are valid for all languages. He ends
up by proposing a definition based on Langacker’s notion of profile determinant, with the
addition of a reference to the primary bearer of meaning: according to Croft the head is “the
profile equivalent that is the primary information-bearing unit, that is, the most contentful
item that most closely profiles the same kind of thing the whole constituent profiles” (Croft,
2001, p. 259).

Complementation Versus Modification

Before proceeding to discuss how we go about identifying complements as opposed to

modifiers, a few words should be said about terminology. In the first place the word “com-
plement” itself is used in two quite distinct senses in the literature. The most common usage
 COMPLEMENTATION 3

is the one described in this article, in which complement refers to the obligatory dependent
of some head. However, some grammars, including the very widely used Quirk, Green-
baum, Leech, and Svartvik (1985), restrict the meaning of “complement” to what are more
commonly called predicatives. Thus the word cold in The beer is cold is a complement in their
terminology and is distinguished from subjects, objects, and adverbials. In the next section
we will also see that some other grammarians make a clear distinction between subjects and
(other) complements, restricting the latter on the clause level to direct and indirect objects,
predicatives, and obligatory adverbials.
Complements in the sense intended here, especially on the clause level, are sometimes
referred to as “participants” with modifiers being referred to as circumstantial elements
(Halliday, 1970, p. 146; Fawcett, 2000, p. 29). This terminology is related to Tesnière’s (1959)
distinction between actant and circonstant. Another term used for a clausal complement is
“argument,” with the term “satellite” sometimes used for modifiers (Siewierska, 1991, p.
55). Clausal modifiers are also often referred to as “adjuncts” and contrasted with “valents”
(Hudson, 2010, p. 152), arguments (Croft, 2001, p. 274), or complements (Huddleston & Pul-
lum, 2002, pp. 219ff.; Anderson, 2011, pp. 55ff.). These differences in terminology are not
necessarily a reflection of differences in understanding the nature of complementation and
modification, since they all ultimately depend on the closeness of the relationship between
a head and its various dependents.
Various criteria, morphological, syntactic, and semantic, have been proposed for distin-
guishing between complements and modifiers. Matthews (1981, pp. 123–36) discusses five
such criteria, and Huddleston and Pullum (2002, pp. 219–28) eight. There are many cases
in which it is easy to distinguish complements from modifiers, but also some rather fuzzy
areas which pose problems: hence the need for so many criteria. This indeterminacy points
to both categories of relationship being prototype-based rather than Aristotelian in nature.
In the end the distinction usually boils down to the semantics of the head of a construc-
tion. Indeed, although Huddleston and Pullum describe five of their eight criteria as syn-
tactic, these are actually all difficult to operationalize without invoking the meaning of
the head.
In his discussion of complementation Langacker (2008, pp. 199ff.) draws a useful distinc-
tion between conceptually autonomous and dependent items (though it is unfortunate that
“dependent” is here used in another meaning than syntactically subordinate to a head).
In example (1) the three nominals—she, the cold beer, and the fridge—are conceptually
autonomous in the sense that one can picture all three clearly without their being involved
in a predication. The verb put and the preposition into, on the other hand, are conceptually
dependent, in the sense that they depend on other elements to pin down their contextual
meaning. We can only conceive of them on a very schematic level. They have empty slots,
which Langacker calls “elaboration sites,” which need to be filled in. In other words, in
a complementation relationship, the head is dependent on its more autonomous depen-
dents. The exact opposite is the case for modification. Cold is conceptually dependent,
beer conceptually autonomous. To make sense cold needs beer, but beer does not need
cold. When the dependent depends on the head in this way to flesh out its meaning the
relationship is one of modification. The two contrasting relationships are illustrated in
Figure 1.

Complements of Verbs

The number of complements required by a verb is often discussed in terms of the verb’s
valency or transitivity. An intransitive verb has one complement, a subject (she is drinking),
a transitive verb two, a subject and object (she drinks beer), and a ditransitive verb three, a
4 COMPLEMENTATION

Syntactic Syntactic
head dependent

Conceptually elaborates Conceptually

Complementation
dependent autonomous

Conceptually elaborates Conceptually

Modification
autonomous dependent

Figure 1 Complementation compared to modification

subject and two objects (she poured him a beer). Other verbs with three complements include
those that occur with an object and an adverbial (put) and those that have an object and a
predicative (name). The fact that drink has been used as an example of both an intransitive
and a transitive verb shows that expressing valency restrictions as a function of verbs them-
selves is misleading. Most English verbs, as documented copiously by Levin (1993), occur
in a variety of constructions, or “predicate frames,” to employ the FG term. It is therefore
more correct to speak of complementation patterns within constructions. Although most
verbs typically occur in a small handful of constructions, they may sometimes be coerced
into occurring in other constructions, as in Goldberg’s (1995) classic example of the type he
sneezed the tissue off the table.
The subject is the only complement that is obligatory in all sentences in English (though by
no means in all languages: Latin and Icelandic, to name but two, do not require a subject in
utterances equivalent to English It is raining). Some grammarians exclude the subject from
among the complements of the verb for theoretical reasons. These include generative gram-
mar (Siewierska, 1991, p. 139) and systemic functional grammar (SFG: see Fawcett, 2000,
p. 112). Word grammar (Hudson, 2010, p. 282) distinguishes between subject and comple-
ment as two sorts of “valent” which is Hudson’s term for complement. Other approaches
that subsume subjects under complements include RRG (Van Valin & LaPolla, 1997, p. 31)
and CG (Langacker, 2008, p. 210). This is also the stance of Huddleston and Pullum (2002,
p. 53). The fact that subjects are considered to be complements does not, of course, imply
that they are identical in all respects to complements like objects and adverbials; merely that
they stand in a similar sort of relationship to the verb.
Modifiers of verbs take the form of optional adverbials and are generally referred to as
adjuncts. Again there are many instances in which the distinction between the two is easily
drawn. To give just one example, into the fridge in example (1) is obviously a complement,
yesterday obviously an adjunct. In the sentence She poured a beer for him, however, the adver-
bial for him is less easy to categorize. It would seem to be an adjunct insofar as it is neither
obligatory nor latent. One can conceive of the pouring of beer without necessarily having a
recipient in mind. On the other hand, the indirect object in She poured him a beer does appear
to be a complement. It is certainly neither a modifier nor a determiner and it closely resem-
bles the complement in she gave him a beer. The question then is whether we wish to assign
a different classification to the beer recipient coded by for him in the first sentence than him
in the second (see Matthews, 1981, p. 129, for a discussion of similar examples).
Another area in which the distinction between verbal complementation and modification
is less easily drawn is when a verb, especially one in the first person present tense, is fol-
lowed by a finite clause without a that complementizer, as in (6).

(6) I think the beer’s in the fridge.

(7) I think that the beer’s in the fridge.
 COMPLEMENTATION 5

(8) The beer’s in the fridge, I think.

(9) The beer’s probably in the fridge.

In (6), as in (7) and (8), there is no doubt that the predication of the beer’s location is con-
ceptually autonomous and I think conceptually dependent. The question is which of the two
is the syntactic head and which the syntactic dependent. Is (6) like (7) in which the comple-
ment status of the that clause is signaled by the presence of the complementizer? Or is it more
like (8) in which I think functions as an adverbial modifier, much like probably in (9)? This
question was posed forcefully by Thompson (2002) in a paper which has generated a consid-
erable amount of debate. Basing her argument on a small corpus of conversation data, she
maintains that the traditional analysis of finite clauses such as the beer’s in the fridge in (6) is
misguided, that what was traditionally analyzed as a complement clause is not actually sub-
ordinate to the complement-taking predicate (CTP—Thompson uses this established term
for the matrix verb even though she argues that it does not in fact take a complement). In
other words, according to Thompson, the dependency relations in (6) are the same as those
in (8). She argues that the primary function of an utterance such as (6) is not to express a
thought on the part of the thinker, but rather the predication of the beer’s location, with I
think functioning as an epistemic adverbial modifier.
Thompson’s analysis of CTP sentences has given rise to considerable discussion. The gen-
erative grammarian Frederick J. Newmeyer tested her arguments against a much larger
spoken corpus, in which he found that 16% of the occurrences of I think were followed by
that. He writes that: “From the fact that speakers manifest a structurally subordinate position
for complements 16% of the time, it does not of course logically follow that they do so 100%
of the time. But surely that is the default hypothesis” (Newmeyer, 2010, p. 9). Verhagen
(2010) on the other hand maintains that “it may be clear that that is a marker of comple-
mentation, but this is not at all clear for (structural) subordination” (Verhagen, 2010, p. 53).
Indeed, Kaltenböck (2011), in an investigation of the prosody of I think constructions with or
without that, found no significant difference in prosodic prominence between constructions
containing the two forms. He concludes that

the that-complementizer following initial I think no longer functions like a gen-

uine subordinator. Its function in spoken language is primarily a linear one,
i.e. on the temporal plane, like a typical filler, not so much a hierarchical one,
i.e. marking syntactic subordination and backgrounding. (Kaltenböck, 2011,
pp. 106–7)

Boye and Harder (2007), while endorsing some of Thompson’s arguments, maintain that
she oversimplifies matters when she “draws conclusions about grammatical classifications
based directly on language usage, thus flattening out what we see as a complex dynamic
relationship between structure and use” (Boye & Harder, 2007, p. 577). Boye and Harder
distinguish between what they call lexical CTPs, (some of) which may or may not function
in actual usage as the head of a complement construction, and grammatical CTPs. Accord-
ing to them, “a (weakly) grammatical CTP . . . is non-argument-assigning, non-predicating
and non-profile-imposing because it has taken the first step down a path of grammaticaliza-
tion together with the CTP clause in which it is involved” (p. 581). In actual usage events
these grammatical CTPs always have secondary status, whereas some lexical verbs may
have either primary or secondary status depending on the context. This may be illustrated
by the difference in the form of the tag questions in (10) and (11).

(10) I think the beer’s in the fridge, don’t you?

(11) I think the beer’s in the fridge, isn’t it?
6 COMPLEMENTATION

In (10) it is the CTP that is addressed in the tag question, indicating that it has primary
discourse status. In (11), on the other hand, it is the predication of the beer’s location that is
questioned, indicating that it, rather than the act of thinking, is foregrounded.
It is no accident that it is finite clauses as opposed to non-finite ones that have given rise
to disagreement as to their syntactic status. According to Verspoor (2000), “the conceptual
distance between main clause subject and event or state of affairs in the complement clause
is greatest with the that clause and shortest with the plain infinitive or predicate adjunct
constructions” (Verspoor, 2000, p. 219). It is this conceptual distance that allows for either
of them being chosen as the primary import in a communication—if it is the complement
clause that is chosen, that may be omitted, and, in effect, the clause no longer functions as a
complement at all.

Complements of Prepositions, Adjectives, and Nouns

The complements of prepositions are sometimes referred to as prepositional objects.

Another term, used in SFG, is “completive” (Fawcett, 2000, p. 205). Prepositional comple-
ments were traditionally thought to be just nominal, like fridge in into the fridge. When a
preposition such as before was followed by a clause it was called a “subordinating conjunc-
tion.” This usage has been disputed by Hudson (2010, p. 288) as well as by Huddleston
and Pullum (2002, p. 1011) who provide a list of arguments for considering clauses to be
complements of prepositions. Thus both the nominal the concert in she finished her beer before
the concert and the clause she left in she finished her beer before she left are considered in this
approach to be complements of before.
Adjectival complementation is less common in English than both verbal and prepositional.
There are nonetheless some adjectives that require complements. One such is easy. In order
to understand a sentence such as This beer is easy one must be able to identify the function
for which it is being evaluated. Do we mean to brew or to guess the identity of, for example?
The appropriate infinitive clause is obligatory: it must either be stated explicitly or retriev-
able from the discourse context. Similar to adjectives like easy in this respect are nouns like
belief (Van Valin & LaPolla, 1997, p. 54). As Anderson puts it “nouns which are (overtly or
covertly) derivative of verbs can manifest the pattern of dependents associated with the
corresponding verb, though in their case the equivalent of verbal complements, including
the equivalent of the subject, are generally omissible” (Anderson, 2011, p. 44). Thus while
it would be very rare to omit the complement of the verb believe (although possible with
the default complement in God), it is much more common for the complement of the noun
to be implicit. Indeed, so common is the omission of understood dependents of nouns that
Huddleston and Pullum dispense with the criterion of obligatoriness in their distinction
between nominal complements and modifiers. They consider all dependents that “express
semantic arguments of the head noun” to be complements rather than modifiers (Huddle-
ston & Pullum, 2002, p. 442). To take one of their examples, in the most expensive car of the man
who lives next door they classify the of-phrase as a complement, since it codes the expression
of ownership. Unlike Huddleston and Pullum, many grammarians restrict nominal heads
that take complements to deverbal nouns.

SEE ALSO: Cognitive Grammar; Construction Grammar; Formal and Functional

Approaches to Grammar; Functional Grammar

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 COMPLEMENTATION 7

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Suggested Readings
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). The Longman grammar of
spoken and written English. Harlow, England: Longman.
8 COMPLEMENTATION

Diessel, H. (2004). The acquisition of complex sentences. Cambridge, England: Cambridge

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