SVOC -> SVCO

Question

Hello TeachersIn a forum for English learning Japanese people, I have lately had a debate over the sentences having the pattern &lt;SVOC&gt;. Here S denotes ‘subject’, V ‘verb’, O ‘direct object’, and C ‘complement’. Those patterns are troublesome for me in many respects. One of the problems is that you change it to &lt;SVCO&gt; when O is a long noun phrase, but seemingly not always do so. For example, let me take “He made his view clear” as an example. You would say “He made clear his view on the city reform plan” rather than “He made his view on the city reform plan clear”. But how about the case of “He bought the grammar book new”. Do you say “He bought new the grammar book his teacher had advised him to read”? I suppose you would not. If I am right, why is there such a difference?paco

CalifJim · Accepted Answer

I think it's because "make clear" forms a semantic unit equivalent to "clarify". "buy new" exhibits no such coherence.

Other than that, I don't know.

CJ

Paco2004 · Answer

Hello CJ

Thank you for the reply. I should write back earlier but I have pondered on your answer.

I understand “make O clear” and “buy O new” are quite different in the degree of the complement’s dispensability. “He made his view clear” is very different semantically from “He made his view”. But “He bought the book new” doesn’t differ so much from the simple “He bought the book” (“new” only informs the state of “the book” at the time “he bought the book”). So now I think “make O clear” is not a good example to make my problem clear.

How about the case of “She swept the floor clean”? As we can say “She swept the floor”, this “clean” could be said to be similar, in its dispensability, to “new” in “He bought the book new”. Nevertheless, I suppose, you would move “clean” before the object when it is a heavy noun phrase, like “She swept clean the floor her children had littered”. I am puzzled at the difference in the moblity of the complement between "sweep O clean" and "buy O new".

paco

CalifJim · Answer

I am puzzled at the difference in ...
Hmmm. So am I.

And yet ...

We sweep a floor until it becomes clean.
We don't buy a book until it becomes new.

Is there anything worth pondering in this observation?

CJ

Pieanne · Answer

Couldn't it be a very Germanic construction?

In German (and I think in Dutch too) there are verbs with a "separable particle" (I don't know if it's the right word in English), and in that case, the particle expresses the result of the action of the verb.

It could be compared with "he slammed the door closed" (is it correct?) / vs / "I bought the box closed"

Komountain · Answer

Hi, Paco.

My guess, maybe a wild one:

There seems to be a divide. If the C is the result of the verb's action, SVCO is possible. But if the C expresses the state at the time of action, only SVOC is possible.

He pushed open the gate that had been shut for quite a long time. (open: the result of 'push')

She snipped open the letter from her uncle who had been very nice to her. (open: the result of 'snip')

vs

He left his classroom angry. (angry: the state at the time of 'leave')

She came back home hungry. (hungry: the sate at the time of 'come')

Unfortunately, I am not sure whether this divide can be applicable universally.

Paco2004 · Answer

Hello guys

Thank you all for the nice comments.

I have thought a similar thing to what KoMountain is saying. Let me use some personal terms. So called SVOC patterns can be classed first into “indispensable-C constructs” and “dispensable-C SVOC constructs”. The indispensable-C SVOC-construct can be represented by such a sentence like “He made his view clear”[1]. Here “clear” is a constituent indispensable to make the sentence meaningful. On the other hand, “She swept the floor clean”[2] and “He bought the book new”[3] are both dispensable-C SVOC-constructs because they can make sense without the complement “clean” or “new”. However, the complements “clean” and “new” have different semantic roles. As KoMountain pointed out, “clean” is the result of the event of “She swept the floor”, whereas “new” is a word depicting the state of the object “the book”. So, as some linguists did, we might term the sentences like [2] as “resultative SVOC-construct” and those like [3] as “depictive SVOC-construct”.

Although some linguists have discussed on these resultative and depictive constructs in parallel, they seem not to have noticed the difference in the syntactic behavior of the complement. Native speakers’ usage of these constructs suggests the complement of the resultative constructs can move to the position before the object but that of the depictive constructs cannot. So I think we could parse a resultative construct the way like “She [swept [the floor] clean] and a depictive construct the way like “He [bought [the book new]]”. In another word, I feel, we can deem the resultative complement like “clean” in [2] as a constituent similar to an adverb, while the depictive complement like “new” in [3] seems able to be taken as a kind of post modifier.

“The smith hammered the metal flat hot”. This is a sentence a Japanese scholar presented as an example of double C constructs (SVOCC). Here “hot” is to be a depictive complement and “flat” is to be a resultative complement. I feel the word order is rather wrong. According to my theory, the sentence should be either “The smith hammered the metal hot flat” or “The smith hammered flat the metal hot”. Am I wrong?

paco

Pieanne · Answer

I'd be more comfortable with "he hammered the hot metal flat"...

I can't think of an example where you can have both constructs at the same time, I mean with the same verb... It doesn't sound logical, to me at least

Paco2004 · Answer

Hello Pieanne

Doesn't sound logical? I think it is logically possible. "The smith hammered the metal into a plate while it was hot". The problem is rather that I have never come across any sentence of SVOCC pattern other than this example.

paco

Anonymous · Answer

What about "The smith hammered the metal into a plate while it was hot... until he was tired
on the anvil...
befor after removing it from the fire
etc...
i am not an english teacher, but i think there are manymore C`s that can be added, but then i maybe missing a very simple point.

Anonymous · Answer

I have a red car what is the sentence pattern?

SVOC -> SVCO

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