Adpositional complementives are generally spatial in nature, as in example (15a), where the locational adpositional phrase in het zwembadin the swimming pool is predicated of the noun phrase Jan. Section 32.3.1.1, sub II, has argued that the adposition can be considered as a two-place predicate that denotes a spatial relation between its complement (the reference object) and the argument of which the full adpositional phrase is predicated (the located object). This means that the semantic interpretation of example (15a) is as given in (15b).

However, there are also adpositional complementives that are non-spatial in nature. In the idiomatic examples in (16a), for instance, the PP denotes a mental state of the subject of the clause and therefore typically selects a [+human] subject; these PPs are mostly fixed expressions, which is clear from the fact that the noun sas only occurs in this construction. Although they seem less numerous, there are also more or less fixed expressions like (16b), which are predicated of [-human] entities.

Spatial and non-spatial complementives are discussed in more detail in Section 35.2.1.1 and Section 35.2.1.2, respectively.