John is here.
John is in the kitchen.
John is in for it.

When is the exam?
The exam is Thursday.
The exam is next week.

Complement? Adverb? Adverbial?

I'm afraid I can't see much of a problem here.

A.

First a definition:

'Complement' is a general term denoting that there is more than just the
verb (or rather the verbal part) in a sentence. Everything that MUST be
added to create a sentence is a complement. With 'shine' only one
complement is necessary, namely the subject, with 'put' three complements
are necessary (subject, object, adverbial of direction).

There are several types of complements - S,O,A, subject complement, object
complement. Which of these are necessary depends on the individual verb.
See discussion on valences some time ago.

'Be' is a verb that needs two complements, a subject and a subject
complement or an adverbial.

Subject complements:
                    SC
His clothes were / wet /.
You are /teachers/.
The point is /that nobody was aware of what was going on/.
This is /what happened.

Adverbials (see the above sentences).

There is a great number of adverbial types: apart from the obvious ones
like place, direction, time, etc. there are many others, most of which have
no traditional name.

The adverbial slot in a sentence with 'be' is mostly an adverbial of place,
but adverbials of time are not rare (see sentences above). Whether the
meaning of 'be' is a little different with place or time adverbials is of
no avail, because this is regularly the case when the valence changes. A
good example is 'take' - as any dictionary will illustrate.

Apart from place and time adverbials after 'be', there are also others, e.g.
             A
They are/to be married in June/.
He's been /to see his uncle/.

This is one of the (traditionally) nameless adverbial types.

B.

Some problems that have been discussed arise only because 'adverb' and
'adverbial' are often used as synonyms, which, of course, they aren't.

'Adverb' denotes a word class, like 'noun', 'adjective'. 'Adverbial' refers
to a function in the sentence, like 'subject', 'object'. (In the same way
'verb' and 'verbal part' must be distinguished, or 'noun' and 'subject'...).

The function of ADVERBIAL can be performed by all sorts of structures:
adverbs of course(here),but also adverb groups (quite nicely), noun
(Thursday), noun group (every morning), prepositional phrase (on the roof),
wh-sentence (where no man has ever been), subclause structure (because he
wasn't home), to-inf sentence (to make her happy), etc.

On the other hand, ADVERBS can perform a great number of functions, not
just adverbial, e.g. they can be attributes in adjective groups (very
fast), they can be disjuncts (fortunately, the man turned up), conjuncts
(however, this was quite different), and many more.

Neither the term 'adverb' nor the term 'adverbial' should be seen as a
wastepaper basket term, as some will have it, where you put what you can't
explain. If things can't be explained, it just means that we don't know
enough yet, either as individuals or as linguists. In the latter case more
research is needed, that's all.

By the way, in the scope and sequence discussion it was said that teachers
cannot be expected to understand linguistic models when they are a little
more adequate than the usual school grammar. Teachers are not that dumb,
good heavens, we are all teachers, one way or another. The problem is that
most teachers have never learned anything else. They were taught school
grammar in school (instead of learning to look at language itself), then
the same at college, and then by the textbooks they use as teachers. By the
time they have taught for a few years, they have internalized the
traditional rules and have learned to negate their brains' protests against
illogical terminology and rules, and after that it is very difficult to
open their eyes and make them look 'naively' at language itself and at the
models they use. And so they teach school grammar again, and the cycle
starts anew.

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Burkhard Leuschner -  Paedagogische Hochschule Schwaebisch Gmuend, Germany
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