Verb complementation

Pigfoot wrote:

Is the clause complement of "tends" adjectival or nominal?  Or, are verb complements no longer only adjectival or nominal?

Hello Pigf again

I'm a bit curious about your way of understanding infinitives. May I ask you one question? How do you parse "He seems to be hungry"? Is "to be hungry" an adjective or a noun? If this "to be hungry" is an adjective to you, I think, you might think "to get hungry" in "John often tends to get hungry" is also an adjective.

paco

 All I can say is that it is a non-finite clause. I am not sure whether the label "direct object" would fit here, because you cannot "tend something". You can only "tend to do something" or "tend to behave in a particular manner". If I were to call it anything, I'd call it Verbal Complement. :/

Paco- What the hell does "elide" mean?

to get hungry=adj?

To me it looks like a verb ..another example : ''I'm getting restless'' ..

I'm with Quirk, as long as "semi-auxiliary" comes with a meaningful definition. What is the point of forcing odd linguistic items in big category bags? They only cause trouble there, and confute the statements you may wish to make concerning your big categories.

None of Miriam's examples is quite the same as tend - a verb which absolutely must have a verbal partner. Is there another? Complement is a kind of catch all word, so you can call the verbal partner that, but if you want to be more specific I suggest you say "verbal partner complement". Why make things more complex than that?