On the Headstream of the Complement in Japan－Literature of First Appearance

Abstract

The grammatical term Complement is considered to be equal to Hogo in Japanese, and to stand for the elements required to complete the incomplete predication in the Second and the Fifth Form in the Five Sentence Forms. It has been stated, up to now, that the first grammatical terminology named Complement in the English Grammar Reference book published in Japan appeared in Saito (1893). This paper will reexplore the origin of Complement to Cox (1880) and discuss the background of its birth and its syntactic problems.