This paper is primarily concerned with inquiring into how early syntactic analyses in English grammar was affected by Carl Ferdinand Becker’s work on German grammar and syntax, and how three English grammarians improved Becker’s system to adjust it to the English language. The system proposed by Becker (1830) hinged on the logical analyses of the predicate, which caused problems when adapted to English grammar. For example, Becker analyzed the Be verb as Copula, the predicate adjective or noun as Predicate. He also analyzed the Objective Complement as Object, which stood in the Factitive relation with the verb in the predicate.
Arnold (1848) was the first grammarian to improve on Becker’s system when he proposed the novel grammatical term Complement, which works as an Objective Complement in the present pedagogical English grammar. However, Arnold took over the Copula analysis of Becker’s and regarded the Be verb as Copula, thereby Subjective Complement and Objective Complement were analyzed independently without regard to the notion of incompleteness of the predication.
Next, Morell (1852) treated the Be verb as a verb, which required a noun or an adjective to complete the predicate. However, Morell overgeneralized Becker’s analysis of Completion and analyzed Subjective Complement as an Object, thereby no syntactic distinction was made between the elements required by a transitive verb, and an intransitive verb of incomplete predication.
Finally, it was Mason (1858) that first proposed Complement used in the present pedagogical English grammar, which covered both Subject and Object Complement. Mason made a distinction between an objective relation and an adverbial relation, which had been uniformly classified into objective relation in Becker’s system. By proposing the notion of Intransitive and Transitive Verb of Incomplete Predication separately, Mason analyzed Subjective Complement and Objective Complement respectively.
