Treebanks are used for various purposes in language technology, but the wealth of data they contain can also be put to good use for the purpose of linguistic description and linguistic theory. To demonstrate this I will show how the treebank of the Spoken Dutch Corpus can be exploited to improve our understanding of what it is that distinguishes predicative complements from other types of complements. Section 1 shows why this distinction matters, section 2 provides a brief presentation of the treebank, section 3 gives a comprehensive survey of the intransitive predicate selecting verbs, based on the treebank data, section 4 presents a number of factors which can be used to differentiate the predicate selecting uses of the relevant verbs from their other uses, and section 5 summarizes the results. 1 Predicative complements Distinguishing a predicative complement from an object complement is easy in pairs like (1). (1) a. Fred is a plumber. b. Fred knows a plumber. The complement of the copula denotes a property which is attributed to the referent of the subject, and the copula itself is little more than a carrier of mood and tense. By contrast, the complement of know denotes an entity and the verb denotes a binary relation between that entity and the referent of the subject. Since the verb is the only element that overtly distinguishes (1a) from (1b), it might seem sufficient to draw the distinction, but the matter is more complex, since many verbs are used either way. The second complement of call and make, for instance, is predicative in (2), but not in (3). (2) a. Don’t call me a liar. b. They will make you chairman. 1This work is part of a larger project on the syntax and semantics of clauses with predicative complements. So far, it has yielded an HPSG style analysis of such clauses (Van Eynde 2008) and a semantic analysis of the copula, presented at the HPSG-2009 conference. Proceedings of the 19th Meeting of Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands Edited by: Barbara Plank, Erik Tjong Kim Sang and Tim Van de Cruys. Copyright c ©2009 by the individual authors.