"Complain of" or "complain about"?
Lidia Novitchkova
Can anybody comment on grammatical or stylistic differences in use of
"complain of" and "complain about"? Examples and/orwill be of great help
also.
Regards and thanks,
Lidia Novichkova
Lidia Novitchkova
Can anybody comment on grammatical or stylistic differences in use of
"complain of" and "complain about"? Examples and/or useful web links will be
vorot...@yahoo.com
There's no difference.
Ivan
Don Phillipson
news:dsaib5$1djd$1...@gavrilo.mtu.ru...
> Can anybody comment on grammatical or stylistic differences in use of
> "complain of" and "complain about"? Examples and/orwill be of great help
These phrases overlap semantically, i.e. are interchangeable
in half or more of all possible sentences. But a distinction
remains, e.g. it is better to say:
Robert complained of toothache (not about)
Robert complained about the bus service on Tuesday (not of.)
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)
Stephen Calder
I'm more likely to complain of an ailment, although I can complain about
it too.
I'm more likely to complain about an external annoyance such as an
untidy room. I wouldn't complain of an untidy room.
--
Stephen
Lennox Head, Australia
Weatherlawyer
> >>Can anybody comment on grammatical or stylistic differences in use of
> >>"complain of" and "complain about"?
> I'm more likely to complain about an external annoyance such as an
> untidy room. I wouldn't complain of an untidy room.
In its intransitive form as with "to snow" "or to sleep":
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=complain%20 it is as above.
But isn't it a transitive verb when used in the legal sense of lodging
a complaint?
Or a psychological sense when your body complains about (for example)
the snow or lack of sleep?
http://grammar.uoregon.edu/verbs/transitive.html
Or am I over egging it? After being told to <b>snow</b><u> him</u>.... ?
vorot...@yahoo.com
Yes, you are. There is no difference at all. Some might be used to
using "about" in some instances and "of" in others. But grammatically
they are both prepositions; they are the same.
Daniel James
wrote:
> ... grammatically they are both prepositions; they are the same.
That's a bit of a fatuous generalization!
"On" and "under" are both prepositions, but "the book is on the table" is
not the same as "the book is under the table", by any means.
"To" is a preposition, but to "complain about" someone is not the same as
to "complain to" someone.
It happens that in English one can use either "of" or "about" after
"complain" with (almost) the same meaning, but it's not true to suggest
that because they are prepositions they contribute nothing to the meaning
of the sentence in which they occur.
Cheers,
Daniel.
Odysseus
>
> Can anybody comment on grammatical or stylistic differences in use of
> "complain of" and "complain about"? Examples and/orwill be of great help
> also.
As others have pointed out, they overlap. But I would say "complain
about" is the more literal of the two, the implied "complaint"
usually being a specific act of speech or writing; "complain of" is
the more figurative, where the "complaint" can be construed as an
ailment or irritant, as opposed to an overt expression of the
discomfort caused thereby.
--
Odysseus