I just answered a battery of test questions, and posted the following comment:
"I got them all correctly."
Should I have said "I got them all correct."?
Learn English – Correct or correctly: “I got them all correct / correctly”
adjectivesadverbscomplementsmeaningsyntactic-analysis
Best Answer
I'm assuming here that the Original Poster means that his answers to the question were correct (sentence (1) would be grammatical if the meaning was entirely different). In order to understand why we need to use correct here, and why correctly is wrong, we need to understand the structure of the sentence.
The sentence can be broken down like this:
In this type of construction the verb GET takes two complements. The first is a Direct Object, the second is a Predicative Complement.
A Direct Object describes the recipient of some sort of action. It tells us the "patient" in the agent/patient relationship. In this sentence I is the agent, the actor, and them is the patient.
A Predicative Complement, on the other hand, is a complement of the verb that tells us something about the Subject or Object. It describes some attribute. In the following sentence happy is a Predicative Complement that describes the Object, Mary:
At the end of the process Mary was happy. Notice that we use an adjective there. We cannot use adverbs as Predicative Complements:
We can often use adjectives and nouns as Predicative Complements, sometimes we can even use clauses, but never adverbs. In the type of construction used by the Original Poster, the Predicative Complement describes the Direct Object of the verb. This Predicative complement needs to be an adjective, not an adverb:
Notice that the last two examples there could be correct if the sentence means something different.These sentences would mean that he obtained or did something in the correct way or in the wrong way - not that the things themselves were correct or wrong.