3.9 Position of complement

Rule: Complements normally follow the verb.

Examples of errors:

1. Important here it is to emphasize the dangers of abortion.
2. Not clear are sometimes idiomatic expressions.
3. A good example of this policy gives an interview with a manager of British Leyland.
4. Following words he prefers.
5. That these problems really have their cause in the living conditions in cities proves that such gangs of children cannot be found in smaller towns or villages.

Complements include adjective phrases acting as subject complements (cf. (l)-(2)), as well as noun phrases or that clauses acting as direct object (cf. (3)-(5)). There are instances where complements of various types can precede the verb, but none of the sentences above (nor the contexts in which they occur) meets these conditions. For example, the first element. of a comparison may be front in literary or formal style for emphasis:

So clear is his oral expression that no one could misunderstand him.

In rhetorical style a complement may be fronted to emphasize a parallelism between two adjoining clauses:

His words I like, but his deeds are despicable.

In informal speech, it is not uncommon for some element, regardless of its grammatical function in the clause, to be fronted for emphasis, receiving extra stress, and the rest of the clause added, as Quirk et al. put it (1972:§14.11), almost "as an afterthought":

A real problem, that is!

These sentences seem to be of several types, though. Some are probably purely conversational phenomena; i.e. a short answer, which grammatically is a sentence or clause fragment, is given first, and then indeed as an afterthought, the rest of the sentence is supplied. This would be the case with sentences like

Joe, his name is.

In other cases, the beginning of the sentence, which may be relatively unimportant for-communicative purposes, is simply omitted. Seen in this way, the following example is not a case of fronting of the direct object (really good cocktails), but simply a sentence fragment:

Really good cocktails they made at that hotel.
= Those were really good cocktails (that) they made at that hotel.

On the other hand, a sentence like

Relaxation you call it!

with extra stress on relaxation, seems to be a case of true fronting (i.e. not a sentence fragment), the effect of which is to give the initial word a maximum degree of emotional emphasis--often implying astonishment, disbelief, or dismissal. This sentence type is not limited to spoken or informal English, though.

None of the sentences above qualify for these exceptional cases of complement fronting. Apart from this, regarding (1), the subject complement (important) of an extraposed subject clause is not likely to be moved from its usual position after the verb. The same is true of that clauses serving as direct objects (cf. (5)). Finally, the normal subject-verb-object order is never modified when there is a danger that the direct object and subject of the verb can be misconstrued for each other, as is the case in (3) and (5).