I don't think that the way the term "complement" is normally used it
must include the entire predicate. A "complement" "completes" the sense of
the verb, as a transitive verb normally takes an accusative direct
complement and may also take a dative indirect complement. However,
intransitive verbs may take a direct complement in another case, as is
especially common with a dative, e.g. PROSKUNEW in the sense of "worship"
will most normally take a dative of the one worshipped, in which case we'd
call that dative word a direct complement; or again the verb CRAOMAI
normally takes an instrumental dative in Greek, e.g. TOIS CRHMASI CRHTAI,
"he uses (his) money ..." where we would call CRHMASI a direct complement.
On the other hand we may refer to adverbs, adverbial phrases, and
adverbial clauses as "modifiers" of the verb, although they are certainly
part of the entire predicate, just as one would have to say that an
adjective modifying a direct or indirect complement is "within" the entire
predicate.
Let me add another note here, as I've been bothered myself by the
introduction of new grammatical terms:
One of the most annoying things to a student in the early stages of
learning a language must be the fact that different teachers or
grammarians use different terminology for the same grammatical
constructions. The farther one goes into a language, the more one adjusts
to this as an uncomfortable aspect of consulting reference works: what was
once simply a matter of understanding one's native language and the target
language (as well as one's instructor's own "metalanguage" for describing
the grammar) has now become a matter of translating the "metalanguages" of
one to half a dozen or more different grammarians or lexical works into
each other. I suspect it's the old problem of the circular dictionary: you
keep looking at one explanatory definition of a term after another until
you ultimately return to the word you were looking up in the first place,
only to find that you STILL don't know what it means! (This is what
happens to me every time I attempt to tackle a new work in the social
sciences).
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/