Meet the Object Complement

Look at this sentence: The news made Charles angry.

What’s the subject? It’s the news. What’s the verb? It’s “made.” The object, of course, is Charles. He’s the one being made. So what’s that “angry” doing in there? It’s modifying the object. Welcome to the wonderful world of object complements — sometimes crucial sentence elements that (spoiler alert) can also be nouns. Here's my recent column on these little-known but hardworking grammatical units.

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