Complement

In syntax, the term complement is sometimes used in the same sense as argument.

Comments

The term is fairly common in the syntax of German (Ergänzung), especially in German dependency / valence grammar (e.g. Vater 1978, Engel 1988).

In English-language linguistics the term complement in this sense is common only as part of the term complement clause (= "argument clause", a clause that is an argument).

Polysemy

The term complement also refers to

• a syntactic position in the X-bar schema (see complement (in X-bar theory)).
• a non-subject argument, i.e. roughly an object. (This usage seems to have been widespread in 20th century traditional grammar. In this usage, a sentence consists of subject and predicate, and the predicate consists of the verb plus the complements and optional adjuncts. This meaning is standard in Russian-language linguistics.)
• a complement clause (since complement in the sense 'argument' is much rarer than complement clause, this can be abbreviated to complement without serious risk of misunderstanding in many contexts; see Rosenbaum for an influential work)
• a predicate nominal (see complement (predicative))

Synonyms

• argument
• actant
• term (in relational grammar)

Origin

The term is not old in English (the OED's first attestation is from 1874),and its equivalents are much more common in French, German (Ergänzung) and Russian (dopolnenie).

The oldest meaning of complement seems to have been dependent (i.e. not just arguments, but also adjuncts), cf. Grande encyclopédie du XIX siècle (1868) "compléments: mots qui servent à compléter l'idée exprimée par d'autres mots" (the examples make it clear that all kinds of dependents are meant).

References

• Engel, Ulrich. 1988. Deutsche Grammatik. Heidelberg : Groos.
• Rosenbaum, Peter S. 1967. The grammar of English predicate complement constructions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Vater, Heinz. 1978. “On the possibility of distinguighing between complements and adjuncts”. In: Abraham, Werner (ed.) Valence, semantic case, and grammatical relations. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 21-46.

other languages

• German Ergänzung, Komplement
• Russian Дополнение (Dopolnenie)