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I was recently reading George R.R. Martin's Fire and Blood, and I came upon this sentence:

The coming of the new year found Maegor still without a son, not even a bastard who might be legitimized.

The part I would like to draw your attention to is 'Maegor still without a son,' which I have italicised. To me, this looks like a verbless clause, a shortened version of 'Maegor was still without a son,' so I'm wondering what the best way to analyse this sentence is.

Does it contain a verbless clause functioning as a direct object of 'found'? Or is 'Maegor' the direct object and 'still without a son' a prepositional phrase functioning as a complement or adjunct? The latter is supported by the fact it can be made passive, as in 'Maegor was found still without a son.'

In Oxford Modern English Grammar, the author, Bas Aarts, states, perhaps controversially, that a participle clause can function as a direct object, as in 'The administrators recommended Jill carrying out this project.' This would support the idea of a verbless clause receiving the same treatment.

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  • It's not a clause, and the verb found directly precedes the phrase.
    – Yosef Baskin
    Commented Aug 14 at 19:35
  • The coming of the new year found Maegor lamenting his lack of a son would be the equivalent to The administrators recommended Jill carrying out this project. But I don't see anything "controversial" about participle clauses functioning as direct objects. I heard the dog barking looks to me like the same basic construction. And for a "verbless" direct object, I saw a dog with three legs seems to fit the bill - it's not really "shortened" from a dog had three legs, though.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Aug 14 at 20:12

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You will find different interpretations.

  1. Traditional grammar, The Cambridge Grammar (A Student's Introduction to English Grammar p. 76) and Noel Burton-Roberts (Analysing Sentences p. 70), for example, interpret "Maegor" as an object and "still without a son" as an objective predicative complement (or object predicative or object complement). Also, The Cambridge Grammar uses the term "verbless clause" in three places (none of which involves it being an object): (1) a complement to with/without, (2) a complement to other specific prepositions and (3) a supplement.

  2. Transformational grammar, on the other hand (see, for example, Liliane Haegeman's Government and Binding Theory p. 59), interprets the bracketed constituent in "I found [Maegor still without a son]" as a verbless clause (or small clause): "I found [Maegor (to be) still without a son]". Here, they interpret the clause as a complement of the verb. They would not call it an object though. "Object" is not generally used for clausal complements (although some traditional grammars still do so). One of the criteria of an "object" is that it can be "promoted", i.e. moved from object in active to subject in passive. "[Maegor still without a son] was found (by me)" is ungrammatical so this criterion is not met and the clause, if one calls it that, is not an object.

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    Excellent. A balanced answer (rather than one taking it as axiomatic that one interpretation must be adhered to).
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Aug 14 at 22:56

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