Notes 1. Don't expect students to be able to identify clauses as complements. That will come in Level Three. 2. Some students may feel uncomfortable with "best" as the subject, in which case they can consider "best" as an adjective to an ellipsed "score." 3. At this level, I would accept "starts jumping" and "start bouncing" as the finite verbs. In Level Four, students will learn that "jumping" and "bouncing" can more precisely be considered as gerunds functioning as direct objects. 4. Students will recognize "playing golf" as the direct object of "like," but they will not yet know that it is a gerund ("playing") with its own direct object ("golf"). That comes in Level Four. 5. This illustrates one of the problems of traditional grammar textbooks which distinguish transitive, intransitive, and linking verbs, and which usually expect students to memorize a list of linking verbs. How often is "get" on the list of linking verbs? In practice, the only way to determine if a verb is transitive, intransitive, or linking is to look for its complement. If it has no complement, then the verb is intransitive. If it has a complement and the complement is a predicate noun or a predicate adjective, then the verb is a linking verb. If the complement is a direct object, then the verb is transitive. It seems to me, however, that this is useless information. What is important is the existence and nature of the complement. 6. Students who are uncomfortable considering
"biggest" as a predicate adjective may consider it as a normal adjective
to an ellipsed "room," which would then serve as a predicate noun.
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