The main verb denotes situation in which one or more participants are involved. The prototypical semantics of main verbs is to denote a dynamic event, such as material activities, acts of communication, or mental events. These main verbs, the vast majority of all the main verbs, are called lexical main verbs, in contrast to the copular verbs that are described below. In these events, there is usually a primary participant, who is the agent performing the action, the one who communicates, or who experiences the mental process, illustrated by example (3) to (5). In many linguistic traditions, the term argument is used for such participants, and these arguments are analysed in terms of their semantic roles in the state of affairs.

Transitive verbs also have a secondary participant or argument, which acts as the goal or theme of the dynamic event. For activity verbs, such a secondary participant is either the affected theme (goal of the action), or the effected theme (that comes into being through the action), as illustrated by example (3b) and (3c) respectively. For communication verbs, the secondary participant is often the resultant communicative content, which can be expressed by means of a noun phrase or a complement clause, exemplified in (4b) and (4c) respectively, which offer a range of more summarised or more detailed options for representing the content of the act of communication. The secondary participant of a mental process is sometimes to material phenomenon that occasions the perceptual or emotive process of the primary participant, as illustrated by (5b) and (5c), or else it can be the thought that forms in the mind of the person in the case of more cognitive mental processes, as illustrated by (5d).

Some verbs, especially activity verbs with the meaning of giving (gee to give, vat to take, bring to bring), and communication verbs where an overt addressee is present (aansê to tell, vertel to relate, beduie to indicate), take a third participant, a dative (recipient). This is illustrated by example (3d) and (4d).

The exception to the verb-argument combinations is a small class of impersonal verbs that only take a dummy ditit as subject, illustrated by example (6). These verbs all refer to aspects of the weather, especially forms of precipitation.

Some main verbs denote states rather than dynamic events. Among these, as exemplified by (7), the most typical are the copular verbs, which affirm the existence of a state (wees), or express further aspectual (word to become, bly to stay) or modal (lyk to look, blyk to appear) modifications about the state of being. By extension, some verbs of sensory perception (skyn to seem, klink to sound, ruik to smell, voel to feel) or cognition (ken to know, verstaan to understand) can also be used to denote states, rather than acts of perception or cognition, as illustrated by example (8).

The kinds of states that are expressed range from descriptions, typically encoded by predicative adjective phrases, to locations, typically through preposition phrases, to identifying expressions that are usually encoded by noun phrases, as illustrated by examples (9) to (11). Ponelis (1979:220-227) offers a detailed account of the range of copula predicates in Afrikaans.

As to the semantic contribution of the copular verbs themselves in conveying states, opinions differ. In the Syntax of Dutch(Broekhuis et al. 2015:20-21), the view is developed that copular verbs convey very little, and to the extent that there are semantic differences, these relate to tense, aspect and modality, and thus overlap semantically with auxiliary verbs more than with main verbs. Botha (1975) argues that a number of semantic primitives suffice to account for the semantic representation of the copular verbs of Afrikaans. He does not include wees to be itself in his account, but the notion of existence (wees to be) is a primitive that is part of the semantic representation of all other copular verbs. Most copular verbs (e.g. lyk to look, skyn to seem, smaak to taste, klink to sound) contain a semantic component of suspicion, thus a measure of epistemic doubt, but exceptions are blyk to appear, bly to stay, raak to get, word to become and kom to come, where there is no inherent uncertainty in the copular verb. The semantics of uncertainty is illustrated by the examples in (12).