English Grammar Drills

176 Verb Phrases
3. Object adjective complement
Some verbs, including many (but not all) of the verbs that take noun phrase noun phrase
complements, take object adjective complements. Here are some examples:
Adj
Obj Comp
He drives me crazy.
Adj
Obj Comp
The proposal left us cold.
Obj Adj Comp
The jury found them innocent of all charges.
Obj Adj Comp
I like my steak medium-rare.
Most uses of this complement type are phrases that allow very little substitution for the
adjective object complement. For instance, in the four examples of this complement type given
above, few of the adjectives will allow other adjective complements to be used with that verb.
In the first example
He drives me crazy.
we can only substitute a few close synonyms for crazy:
He drives me mad.
He drives me nuts.
In the second example
The proposal left us cold.
about the only substitute for cold is lukewarm:
The proposal left us lukewarm.
The same is true of the remaining two examples. We can only substitute guilty for innocent in the
third example. In the fourth example, we can only substitute words for describing meat (such as
rare, well-done, juicy, and pink) for medium-rare.
As is the case with noun phrase object complements, we can easily recognize adjective object
complements because they must refer to the object. In the first example above, for instance: