An object complement (OC) describes an attribute of the direct object:
The dye turned the water blue.
Here, blue is the object complement. It describes an attribute
(the colour)
of the water, which is the direct object. Here are some more examples:
His comments made me angry (OC).
They elected Amy Treasurer (OC).
Mary called Simon a fool (OC).
Object complements occur after the object which they describe, so the pattern in these sentences is:
Sentence pattern 5
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
S V DO OC
The dye turned the water blue.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
At first glance, some Pattern 5 sentences may look very similar to Pattern
4 sentences. Compare:
[1] Pattern 5: The Manager made Jones captain.
(S+V+DO+OC)
[2] Pattern 4: The Manager made Jones coffee.
(S+V+IO+DO)
The grammatical difference between these two can be seen when we rephrase them. Sentence [2] can be rephrased as:
[2a] The Manager made coffee for Jones
In contrast, sentence [1] cannot be rephrased in the same way:
[1a] *The Manager made captain for Jones.
The element captain in [1] describes an attribute of Jones (Jones is captain),so captain is an object complement.
Similarly, compare:
Pattern 5: Mary called Simon a fool. (Simon is a fool)
Pattern 4: Mary called Simon a taxi. (... called a taxi for Simon)
