Adjective phrases and complementation

I’ve been asked a few times recently about adjective phrases and feel it’s about time I tried to unpick the subject knowledge surrounding these.

We are very familiar with using adjectives or strings of adjectives in front of a noun to create a noun phrase and, in this type of phrase, the noun is the head word.  For example, ‘the lazy, luminous, long-tailed lizard’ contains the adjectives ‘lazy’, ‘luminous’ and ‘long-tailed’ and these are pre-modifying the head word in the phrase which is the noun ‘lizard’. 

Adjective phrases are phrases where the adjective is the head of the phrase, as in the following examples:

The princess was very beautiful.

The policeman’s hunch proved entirely correct.

The decorators painted the room bright pink.

The strong wind made the children quite crazy.

These phrases fill the complement ‘slots’ in a sentence and provide information about the subject or object in the sentence.  Of course, this complement slot can also be filled by a single adjective: The princess was beautiful. 

Complements are one of the five sentence/clause elements in our language and are probably the least familiar to primary teachers.  The sentence elements are as follows:

S – subject

V – verb

O – object (which can be direct or indirect)

A – adverbial

C – complement

Complements do not have to be filled by adjectives/adjective phrases; they can also be nouns/noun phrases.  In the sentence ‘He became a doctor.’ the noun phrase highlighted is a subject complement as it is completing the information about the subject ‘he’.  This gives the structure S V C.

However complements do need to be used with a particular group of verbs, which are often referred to as ‘link’ verbs or copulas.  The verbs which can most commonly be used as link verbs are be, seem appear (look), feel, get, keep, become, turn.  Often the verbs which describe our senses (look, smell, sound, taste, feel) can be used as link verbs. 

If children know verbs as ‘doing words’, these link verbs are often the ones they have difficulty with, as it is harder to understand that they ‘do’ anything.  They more commonly express a state of being.  So really, it’s best to be clear with children and use the correct terminology ‘verb’ – it’s shorter than ‘doing word’ in any event!