As others in this conversation have observed, there is a big difference between these two: The exam is Thursday. The exam is a take-home. Clearly the noun phrase in the second ("a take-home") is what has traditionally been called a subject complement or predicate nominative. "Thursday" in the first, however, is an adverbial and has a quite different role. That isn't in dispute. Whether we want to call it a "complement" is a matter of classification and comes down to how we choose to define "complement." There is certainly a difference between the adverbials in these two sentences: The game was yesterday. The boys were heroes yesterday. In the second of this pair, "yesterday" is a classic time adverbial that modifies the predicate. In the former, the adverbial "yesterday" completes the predicate and so, as Michael Kirchner suggests, could reasonably be classified as a complement. In the following sentence: The family was here yesterday we could then call "here" a complement (predicate adverbial?) but not "yesterday," which is a standard adverbial. Dick Veit >Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 09:28:31 -0800 >From: Michael Kischner <[log in to unmask]> >Subject: Re: Adverbs of time/place as complements > >I never suggested that adverbials such as "Thursday" in "The exam is >THursday" could be considered a noun subject complement. Agreeing that it >is certainly an adverbial, I merely ask whether it could be considered a >_complement_ -- one as yet unnamed in most traditional grammars. That is, >isn't "THursday" a completer rather than a modifiers of "is"? >