I am having trouble parsing a sentence that I read in Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad, Geoffrey Leech's Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English (2002).
The sentence is:
He was surprised to find himself out of breath. (p. 50)
To me, the main verb is 'was' and the subject complement is 'surprised'. After that point, I hit a major snag and do not understand how to parse the rest of the sentence.
According to the book authors, the sentence is parsed as:
- find - main verb, complex transitive
- himself - direct object
- out of breath - object predicative/ object complement
I cannot understand how 'find' is the main verb or what exactly is the complex verb. Is it: to be surprised to find oneself? What about 'was' in 'was surprised?