Verbal complementation: A pedagogical challenge

Errors of verbal complementation are among the most frequent and intractable types of grammatical error produced by ESL learners of all levels. Formal rules help only to a very slight degree, and most of the time one operates on intuition. One avoids constructions such as *Mary avoids to make mistakes. simply on the basis of feel—it sounds and looks odd. Many learners seem to operate on the ‘economy principle’, that is to say, they show a preference for shorter forms, such as the toinfinitive or gerund, resulting in errors such as *He suggested us to leave. The writer makes the point that teaching verbal complementation without invoking semantic considerations may be counterproductive. Verbal complementation is meaning-driven. Verbs possess certain semantic properties which help us to predict the type of complementation that can be selected. Hence, it makes good pedagogical sense to focus on the semantic features of verbs and to notice the dependency relations that exist between them and the allowable complementation sequences.