Complementation of predicative adjectives in English

Abstract

The aim of the current study is to investigate the grammatical function of the specified prepositional phrases following English predicative adjectives. Though it has been assumed by several scholars (Quirk et al. in 1985, Huddleston & Pullam in 2002, for instance) that these elements are complements rather than adjuncts, these prepositional phrases, in fact, do not behave like normal complements. This study investigates in detail the syntactic and semantic properties of these prepositional phrases. As for the syntactic approach, despite the fact that these prepositional phrases are not obligatorily required by the predicative adjectives, their syntactic behavior is reasonably different from those of adjuncts as attested in three syntactic tests, namely Positioning Test, Recursion Test and Prepositional Stranding Test. It is believed that these prepositional phrases syntactically behave as complements regardless of syntactic obligatoriness. As for the semantic approach, these specified prepositional phrases do not capture the semantic behavior of normal complements. In spite of the limited sample size in this current study, such a result is based on the fact that the absence of these specified prepositional phrases does not affect the lexical meaning of the adjectival predicates in given contexts. We come to the conclusion that these specified prepositional phrases of predicative adjectives capture only the syntactic but not semantic behavior of complements. Therefore, it is not sound to classify these PPs as complements, as opposed to the traditional view.