(d) Complement of become
§3.2 Prepositions vs verbs 135One of the main functions in which AdjPs appear is that of predicative complement -
complement to such verbs as be, appear, become,feel, seem, etc. A high proportion
of prepositions can head PPs functioning as complement to be, but they occur less
readily with the other verbs. Most importantly, they do not normally occur with
become. So in general, if you take a PP that can be the complement of be, you will find
it cannot be the complement of become, but with AdjPs there is no such restriction:
[17] ADJP COMPLEMENTS
a. We are grateful to you.
11 a. We became grateful to you.pp COMPLEMENTS
b. We are in your debt.
b. *We became in your debt.Even PPs like in a bad temper, which are semantically very like adjectives, do not
appear with become: we get The boss became angry but not The boss became in a
bad temper.
Adding a modifier to a PP complement to become may improve acceptability a
great deal. Compare, for example, They became in lo ve, which is ungrammatical or
at best marginal, with They became more and more in love, which is acceptable. We
therefore need to formulate the distinction in this way: adjectives can normally head
complements to become, whereas prepositions without modifiers normally cannot.
3.2 Prepositions vs verbs
In general, there is little difficulty in distinguishing verbs from preposi
tions. Verbs usually function as predicator in clause structure, and in finite or infini
tival clauses they are easily recognisable as verbs by this function. There is, for
example, no doubt about the status offollow as a verb in [18]:
[18] a. We always follow the manual. b. I advise you to fo llow the manual.There are, however, a number of prepositions which have the same shape as the
gerund-participle or past participle forms of verbs. These are cases where historical
change led to a word taking on the properties of a preposition in addition to its orig
inal verbal properties, so that it now belongs to both categories. Three examples,
with the relevant word underlined, are given in [19]:
[19] PREPOSITION
a. Fo llowing the meeting, there
will be a reception.
11 a. Owing to the drought, many
fa rms are going bankrupt.
III a. Liz did remarkably well, given
her inexperience.VERB
b. Fo llowing the manual, we tried to
figure out how to assemble the unit.
b. Owing so much to the bank,
fa rmers can 't afford any luxuries.
b. Liz was given only three months
to live.The difference is very similar to the predicand requirement that we discussed above
in connection with the difference between prepositions and adjectives. Predicative