Types of Complements and Their Realizations in Scientific Texts

The following paper was undertaken to further understand the syntactic realizations of one of the major clause constituent, namely the complement C in scientific texts of academic level, (312) sentences all of them were chosen from Geology, Chemistry, Biology and Physics, symbolized as G, C, B and P were analysed. The model adopted in this study was Quirk et al.'s of (1985) to see the effectiveness of the above mentioned constituent realizations and their occurrence in such texts. The complement is restricted in some approaches like Quirk et al.'s model to refer only to the complementing function of structures following verbs "to be " in the case of subject Complement symbolized as (Cs), in the intensive type (SVCs) and the complex-transitive verbs in the case of object Complement symbolized as (Co), in the (SVOCo) where the intensive relation is implied between O and Co. It is hypothesized that the complements occurrences were prominent in the intensive type (SVCs) in comparison with their realizations in the complex-transitive one (SVOCo). The percentages of the Cs, distributed in the SVCs, patterns were very close in the four disciplines. The adjectives with complementation scored the highest rate. The highest rates among these adjective complementation categories were realized by that-clauses, to-infinitive clauses and prepositional phrases. The majority of subjects occurring in the analysed texts were with anticipatory "it". Finally, the Co, in the SVOCo type scored the lower percentage. The contributed percentages were to some extend related. The adjective phrases were dominant with different categories of complementation which were also hypothesized to be an additional characteristic of scientific writing. The findings of the study were found to be in agreement with the hypotheses.