practice takes a subject complement to be something very different from the subject complements of traditional grammar, which are predicative expressions, as just mentioned above. Broadly construed Construed in the broadest sense, any time a given expression is somehow necessary in order to render another expression "complete", it can be characterized as a complement of that expression: with the class – The NP the class is the complement of the preposition, with. Jim will help. – The main verb help is the complement of the auxiliary verb, will. Chris gave up. – The particle up is the complement of the verb gave. as a friend – The NP a friend is the complement of the preposition, as. Construed in the broad sense, many complements cannot be understood as arguments. The argument concept is tied to the predicate concept in a way that the complement concept is not. In linguistics, an adjunct is an optional, or structurally-dispensable, part of a sentence, clause, or phrase that, when it is removed, will not affect the remainder of the sentence except to discard from it some auxiliary information. A more detailed definition of the adjunct emphasizes its attribute as a modifying form, word, or phrase that depends on another form, word, or phrase, being an element of clause structure with adverbial function. An adjunct is not an argument or a predicative expression, and an argument is not an adjunct. The argument-adjunct distinction is central in most theories of syntax and semantics. The terminology used to denote arguments and adjuncts can vary depending on the theory at hand. Some dependency grammars, for instance, employ the term circonstant (instead of adjunct) and follow Tesnière (1959). See also Adjunct Argument Predicate Predicative expression Subject complement References Sources Borsley, R. 1991. Syntactic theory: A unified approach. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Brinton, L. 2000. The structure of modern English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Burton-Roberts, N. 1997. Analysing sentences: An introduction to English grammar. London: Longman. Cowper, E. 2009. A concise introduction to syntactic theory: The government-binding approach. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Crystal, D. 1997. A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics, 4th edition, Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Downing, A. and P. Locke. 1992. English grammar: A university course, second edition. London: Routledge. Fromkin, V. et al. 2000. Linguistics: An introduction to linguistic theory. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Horrocks, G. 1986. Generative Grammar. Longman: London. Huddleston, R. 1988. English