Sentences of the kind John is at the office have the verb be followed by an expression referring to a place. Very often the place complement is a prepositional phrase, but there are certain adverbs that also refer to place. In the following examples, those in group 1 have prepositional phrases as complements and those in group 2 have adverb phrases as complements: 1 The desk is in the study Your daughter may be in this house The jackdaw was on the roof My friends have been in Spain 2 The desk is there Your daughter may be upstairs The jackdaw was above My friends have been abroad It will be noticed that all the examples in lists 1 and 2 have as their subject noun phrases with identified nouns. If we produce sentences of this pattern with unidentified nouns as subject, we get some rather odd results: e.g. A desk is in the study; Some water is in the glass; Several pigeons are there. The oddness of these sentences can be explained by the fact that an alternative pattern is favoured when the subject is ‘indefinite’: There is a desk in the study There is some water in the glass There are several pigeons there We should note that the italicized element is still the one with which the verb is in agreement (…is some water;…are some pigeons). The word there is merely a kind of dummy subject that anticipates the subject proper. Also belonging to what is essentially sentencetype 5 (p. 72) is the kind that has as its subject a noun denoting an event. In this case, the complement refers not to a location in space but to a location in time. The meeting was at three o’clock Her birthday is on Wednesday The election will be in June The strike is tomorrow It was then The sentences listed above with spatial and temporal complements are all stative ones. (See pp. 47, 65 for stative and dynamic.) Whether there are dynamic sentences corresponding to these stative ones would be a matter for more detailed discussion. Or rather, the debate would be about whether the element referring to place is to be considered a complement or an adjunct. For instance, are the italicized phrases in the following to be considered complements? The father went into the study Your crumbs are falling under the table He sank into a comfortable chair A discussion of this matter would require us to define the criteria for distinguishing between complements and adjuncts in far more detail. We may note, however, that the same problem would arise with sentences like He threw the hat into the cupboard, She would put two lumps of sugar into her tea, etc. These are transitive sentences in that they have objects (the hat, two lumps of sugar), but the verbs throw and put seem to require the use of place complements as well. If this is the correct analysis then these sentences have the pattern: subject+verb+object+place
complement.