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Russet leaves were swept by past winds in heaps.

(Original sentence: "Russet leaves, swept by past winds in heaps."— Jane Eyre)

‘In heaps’ can be called as a ‘positional’ complement for verb phrase (were swept), yet it’s not an argument for the verb phrase. And if we regarded the verb phrase as a copular, ‘in heaps’ could be called as a semantic complement for the subject (russet leaves). So ‘in heaps’ may be called as a subject complement. Is this a possible view?

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Listenever
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    It's a resultative phrase. It describes the results of sweeping; into would also be correct. I don't understand the rest of your terminology; it's probably peculiar to your English textbook. There is a lot of variation in terminology, because many authors merely copy others, and lots of authors don't understand English grammar. – John Lawler Feb 18 '13 at 03:33
  • @JohnLawler I think OP is building in part on the discussion at this to try to find generalizable principles in the language. – StoneyB on hiatus Feb 18 '13 at 03:42
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    Those are not terms that will be useful outside a very small set of people who've used the same textbook. Unless one has a test to determine whether Constituent X has Property Y or not, names are useless. – John Lawler Feb 18 '13 at 04:39
  • @JohnLawler, Those are not from any textbook but only from my guessing. I only started to thinking with the syntax terminology after meeting you in this website. Looking ‘resultative phrase’ as a kind of complement also comes from the history, though it resulted in great misunderstanding. : I’m not a student learning English or working with the language. My English started from a book by which a little boy learns the language, and now want to read English story books more easily. That’s why I’m so inquisitive on English structures. – Listenever Feb 18 '13 at 05:19
  • @JohnLawler, For there’s none who tells me what this means or that means and I only get the meanings on my guessing through the understanding tools – grammar. So I was very pleased when you show me your own website’s linguistic terminologies. They are quite different from what I’d learned in my school days around 30 years ago, but I thought it may be more helpful to understand books. So I got two syntax books, one is by Bas Aarts, and read once in a while. : – Listenever Feb 18 '13 at 05:20
  • @JohnLawler, So, the whole terminology is my own combination of this and that, not belongs to anybody or any book. I only hope your and good teachers’ here terminologies and words that I’ve get to help my reading. – Listenever Feb 18 '13 at 05:25
  • How, if you are just making up your own terminology which nobody else knows, can asking us about whether something does or does not meet the unknown criteria for your test possibly be construed to be constructive? @JohnLawler is right: this is not going to be of general use to other people, and probably isn’t useful even to you alone. – tchrist Feb 18 '13 at 12:56
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    Sorting out the terminology is a big problem, all right. I try to use mine consistently, and explain what I mean by example; that's about the best one can do. The fact is that everybody makes up their own terminology, because everybody makes up their own language. What you think of as a Noun Phrase is no doubt different in many ways from what I think of as a Noun Phrase, because how you think and talk is different from the way I think and talk. About anything, not just language. – John Lawler Feb 18 '13 at 16:21
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    I'm not sure I even understand this question, but I still think it's Too Localised. It seems to be asking us whether it's reasonable to categorise a specific usage according to some classification framework that's neither well-established nor clearly defined. – FumbleFingers Feb 18 '13 at 21:17
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    I think I vaguely recall the term "subject complement" as being what one called predicate adjectives and NPs after be. Things like a doctor in Bill's a doctor. I believe the theory was that it couldn't be a direct object because be is intransitive (which is true); and that it had to be something like an object because it was a noun (which is not true). Since it was therefore (officially, at least) in the Nominative Case, it was variously called a "predicate nominative" or a "subject complement", and there was a slanted object-like line for it in sentence diagramming. – John Lawler Feb 19 '13 at 21:02

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Many might see it simply as an Adverbial, or, in functional grammar terms, a Circumstance.

Barrie England
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