Theoretical Grammar of English

Study questions

1. 
   What are the main features of adverbs?
   
2. 
   Why the term "adverb" chosen to name this group of words?
   
3. 
   What sub-types of adverbs do you know?
   
4. 
   Do adverbs have any grammatical category? If the answer is positive which adverbs have it?
   
5. 
   Why do some grammarians consider such verbal phrases as "give up", "dream about" within the adverbs?
   
6. 
   What is the main problem within this group of words?
   

Statives or the Words of Category of State

In English there is a certain class of words which are still disputable.
In works of foreign grammarians they are not considered to be a separate part of speech. Some dictionaries published in the United Kingdom and the USA refer them to predicatives. It is well-known that no grammarians mention this kind of part of speech. To this class of words we include aboard, alive, asleep, afraid, aghast, awake and so on.
Some Russian scientists regard them as a separate part of speech.
B. Khaimovich and Rogovskaya (22)call them adlinks on the analogy of adverbs. These words can be viewed as a part of speech because of their following features:

1. 
   meaning they denote: state
   
2. 
   stem building morpheme: it is formed by the help of productive prefixal morpheme /a-/
   
3. 
   combinability: these words are exclusively combined with the link-verb to be and adverbs
   
4. 
   Syntactic function: they are always used as predicatives.
   

They do not have any grammatical category and this is the only feature of them which differ them from other parts of speech /notional parts are meant/: This part of speech can't be mixed up with adjectives or adverbs as some linguists do, because they do not possess the degrees of comparison and their combinability is different.
"A-" component homonymically combines in itself the functions of prefix, preposition and article.
- the prefix a- can express the meanings of prepositions: away, on, up, out. She is asleep - She is sleeping /on/. He has gone to the shore - He is ashore.
This part of speech seems to be more economical as it is seen from the examples above.
Therefore it may be one of the reasons of its wide usage in Modern English.