Saturday, July 7, 2012

syntactic analysis - Practice makes perfect OR Practice makes perfection OR Practice makes sth/smb perfect?

The verb make is used in various sentence patterns as follows.






  1. SVO = She made some coffee.


  2. SVOC (Adjective Complement) = Music makes me happy.


  3. SVOC (Noun Complement) = They made her the team captain for the coming year.


  4. SV(iO) (dO) = The chef made him a special cake.


  5. SVO+PP with for = I’ve made an appointment for you at the dentist’s.


  6. SVO+AC/NC+PP with for = He made life difficult for me.





All these example sentences are from the "Cambridge Dictionary's" English Grammar Today, and all of them show the presence of an object after the verb make.




The question is: Why does the saying/idiomatic phrase Practice makes perfect not take an object after make? Or, Should it not be perfection (a noun) after make instead of perfect (an adjective)?

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