Dick:  You're right.  The kinds of adverbials that follow be verbs are
fairly limited:  the duration kind, "during the game," are probably exempt.
Straight time and place are the usual categories.

Martha


>As a supplement to Martha's comment (quoted below) that in a sentence like
>"The pain
>is in her foot," the phrase "in her foot" is adverbial: True enough, but there
>is
>more than one kind of adverbial prepositional phrase that can occur in a
>sentence
>with a linking verb.  Take the sentence "The fans were in the stands during the
>game."   Here "in the stands" is an adverbial that is a complement; on the
>other
>hand, "during the game" is a standard verb-phrase abverbial and not a
>complement.
>Notice that you can say, "The fans were in the stands," but you can't say,
>"The fans
>were during the game."  The two adverbial prepositional phrases are doing
>different
>things.  Linking verbs require complements, and adverbials can be complements,
>just
>as noun phrases and adjectival phrases can be complements, but a linking-verb
>sentence can also have an adverbial that is not a complement.
>
>Dick Veit
>
>Martha Kolln wrote:
>
>> . . .  And in the case
>> of "The migraine is in her head," "be" can take an adverbial as well as a
>> subject complement.  The pain is in her foot, The book is in the library,
>> My mother is in the hospital, The play was yesterday.  Those structures
>> following "be" are adverbial, not adjectival.  You might want to call them
>> complements, in that they "complete" the predicate--but they're not
>> adjectival.