Complement

A complement is one of the parts of a sentence. It gives us more information about the subject or the object.

For example:

He goes with me.

I am happy.

To understand what the complement is that we have to know what transitive and intransitive verbs as well as what structural and lexical meaning word is. I, as an author, do not mean to make this lesson difficult or to complicate it. But understanding the stuff will bring you to the details and the complete discussion.

You can click on the links to go to relevant discussions about what transitive or intransitive is and what structural of lexical meaning word is.

Because this is a basic lesson to understand first before others, I will try to explain it by giving you a series of examples and explanation and I hope you can understand this lesson better than I worry about.

Study this following examples:

He goes with me.

/with me/ is not an object. It is a complement. Now let's answer this following question!

If /with me/ is omitted, what will happen?

There will be only /He goes/, right?. /He goes/ is a full sentence where there is one subject /He/ and one predicate /goes/. However, we do not know where he goes and when. Besides, we also want to know with whom he goes. When the complement /with me/ is added after /he goes/, we, at least, understand and get more information about the subject (with whom he goes). On the other hand, /with me/ creates a complete sense of with whom he (the subject) goes.

He helps me lift the table.