The words of category of state

We take the view that they constitute a special part of speech, which may be called "stative" and is characterised by the prefix a-. The main function of the statives is that of predicative and in this case they are preceded by a link verb, most usually the verb be, but occasionally also fall, keep, feel. Statives are also occasionally found in the function of objective predicatives, particularly after the verb find or have and a noun or pronoun, as in the sentences He found his sister alone. The basically predicative quality of the statives is equally evident in all of these cases. It is somewhat weakened when a stative has the function of an attribute following its noun. The phrase "be + stative" may sometimes be synonymous with the continuous form of the corresponding verb. Cf., e. g., He is asleep and He is sleeping, He was asleep and He was sleeping. We are therefore entitled to ask whether these two ways of expression are always interchangeable, or whether a difference of some kind or other exists between them. This question has not been finally answered so far. The existence of statives as a separate part of speech is not uni-versally recognised either for the Russian or for the English lan-guage. We will not enter into details of the problems in reference to Russian but we will briefly consider some objections which have been raised against the stative as a part of speech in Modern English. L.S.Barkhudarov in an article published in 1958 1 denies the existence of statives in English on the following grounds: (1) the meaning of "state" is merely a special variety of the meaning of "property" typical of adjectives, (2) words of this category can be preceded by the word more: more ashamed, etc., (3) they can be modified by adverbs (painfully alive), by prepositional phrases (alive with stars) and they can be the predicative, a post-positional or detached attribute, and, less frequently, a prepositive attribute: The conclusion L. Barkhudarov arrives at is that words of this type are adjectives, which of course is the traditional view. Howev-er, these arguments are not binding. They are based on several as-sumptions which are by no means self-evident or necessary.

39. The verb (Ilysh’s classification). The basic forms of the verb. The verb as a part of speech expresses a process. Verbs are connected with a preceding noun (children play) and with a following noun (play games)(action). These two sets of forms clearly belong to the same verb write and there is some grammatical difference between them. We will not here consider the question whether the relation between writes and is writing is exactly the same as that between wrote and was writing, etc. We will assume that it is the same relation.If we consult the defini-tions of the meaning of is writing given in various grammar books, we shall find, with some variations of detail, that the basic charac-teristic of is writing is this: it denotes an action proceeding continu-ously at a definite period of time, within certain time lim-its. On the other hand, writes denotes an action not thus limited but either occurring repeatedly or everlasting, without any notion of lasting duration at a given moment. It should be noted here that many variations of this essential meaning may be due to the lexical meaning of the verb and of other words in the sen-tence; thus there is some difference in this respect between the sentence the earth turns round the sun and the sentence the sun rises in the East: the action mentioned in the former sentence goes on without interruption, whereas that mentioned in the latter sentence is repeated every morning and does not take place at all in the evening, etc. But this is irrelevant for the meaning of the grammatical form as such and merely serves to illustrate its possible applications.