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"These massive snakes have been known to dine on other predators from time to time, but it's practically unheard of for one to successfully take out a carnivore as sizeable and cunning as a fully grown hyena." (Earth Touch website.)

Is for one to successfully take out a carnivore as sizeable and cunning as a fully grown hyena an object of the preposition "of" or object of verb form (an adjectival complement) "unheard of" in the above?

Mister Micawber · Accepted Answer

AnonymousIs for one to successfully take out a carnivore as sizeable and cunning as a fully grown hyena an object of the preposition "of" or object of verb form (an adjectival complement) "unheard of" in the above?

It's the complement.

BillJ · Answer

AnonymousIs "for one to successfully take out a carnivore as sizeable and cunning as a fully grown hyena" an object of the preposition "of" or object of verb form (an adjectival complement) "unheard of" in the above?

It's neither; it's an "extraposed subject":

… it's practically unheard of for one to successfully take out a carnivore as sizeable and cunning as a fully grown hyena.

This is called an extraposition construction, where the subordinate clause subject of the non-extraposed version is switched to the end of the sentence and the subject position filled by the dummy pronoun “it”. The subordinate clause is called an "extraposed subject", but it's not actually a kind of subject; rather, it's an element in extraposed position, outside the verb phrase, that corresponds to the subject of the basic non-extraposed version.

The underlined subordinate clause is not part of the predicative complement. The complement is just practically unheard of, just as it is in the basic non-extraposed version:

… for one to successfully take out a carnivore as sizeable and cunning as a fully grown hyena is practically unheard of.

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