Verb Complement Types
The SPECIALIST lexicon recognizes five basic categories of verb, depending on the complements they take: intransitive, transitive, ditransitive, linking, and complex-transitive. The first four of these categories bear the names of the traditional verb types to which they correspond. Although the term “complement” is sometimes restricted to verb phrase constituents which follow linking verbs like be, or which enter into an “intensive relation” with an object of a verb, here a complement is considered to be any element of the verb phrase predicated by the verb.
Traditionally, the terms intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive refer to the number and type of noun phrases in the verb phrase. They are used here to refer to the number and type of complements in a verb phrase. Linking is a term traditionally used to refer to verbs which take a complement “referring to” or “in an intensive relationship” to another NP in the sentence. The term “linking” is retained and “complex-transitive” is used for verbs in which two complements may be regarded as being in a close semantic relationship with each other. Verbs can, and often do, fall into more than one category, and may have many complementation patterns within each category.
Five verb complementation patterns are coded in the Lexicon as follows: