Complements Broadly Construed
Construed in the broadest sense, any time a given expression is somehow necessary in order to render another expression "complete", it can be characterized as a complement of that expression, e.g.
-
- with the class
- Jim will help.
- Chris gave up.
- as a friend
Construed in this broad sense, many complements cannot be understood as arguments. The argument concept is tied to the predicate concept in a way that the complement concept is not.
Read more about this topic: Complement (linguistics)
Famous quotes containing the words broadly and/or construed:
“Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, Corn-Pone stands for Self- Approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is Conformity.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“As a practicing member of several oppressed minority groups, I feel that I have on the whole conducted myself with the utmost decorum. I have ... refrained from marching, chanting ... or in any other way making anything that could even vaguely be construed as a fuss.”
—Fran Lebowitz (b. 1950)