In the school course of the Russian language, words denoting a state are studied. Schoolchildren often confuse them with adverbs and adjectives, although they have differences.
State category - these are words whose morphological features allow us to classify them as adverbs, because they answer the questions "what is it?" And How?" and are intended to describe the emotions or moods of animate objects or the physical processes associated with inanimate objects and their environment or environment. For example: The house was restless.
But not so long ago, impersonal predicates, or predicates - another name that words of the state category bear - some linguists began to consider an independent part of speech. But at the same time, there is no unity among scientists on the issue of criteria for belonging to it. The words that make it up are grammatically heterogeneous. Sometimes it includes short forms of adjectives that are not used in full form. For example: obliged, obliged, glad, etc.
State categoryexpressed by words that are most often in impersonal sentences the main members and occupy an independent position. They denote a static situation and have homonyms, so they are difficult to distinguish from adverbs and short forms of adjectives. For example:
1. He has a calm mind (state category);
2. The river flows calmly and smoothly (adverb);
3. The animal is calm (short adjective).
The state category has the following distinguishing features: firstly, it names the mood or emotions of a living being, and also describes the environment. Secondly, it is often part of a nominal compound predicate in an impersonal sentence, where there is no subject. For example:
1. It's cool and damp in the shade.
(habitat condition: cool, damp, light, warm, etc.)
2. He hurts
(physiological sensations of living beings: heard, not seen, hurt, crowded and stuffy, etc.)
3. Oh! How happy !
(human emotional states: offended, happy, scared, annoyed and sorry, etc.)
4. It's a sin not to see this!
(modal categories: sin, necessary, impossible, possible, etc.)
5. Get up early.
(spatial as well as temporal characteristics: late, early, far, close, high).
If the state category (examples below) describes animate objects, then their names are expressed in the form of the dative case. If - the natural environment, then its name is often presented in the form of a prepositional case. For example:
1. One feels bad (one - D.p., name of the person).
2. In summer, the park is shady and cool (in the park - P.p., the name of the natural environment object).
Predicates have permanent and non-permanent morphological features. The permanent category is their immutability. And the inconstant one is the degree of comparison of those words that were formed from quality adjectives. For example:
It's warmer on the south side.
The syntactic role of the words of the state category is limited to the predicate in one-part impersonal sentences.
1. Although it is difficult, but we must go forward!
2. How quiet it is!
Predicates are often used together with the words "will" and "before", "became" and "was", "will become" and "is", etc. For example:
1. But it was quiet.
2. It used to be noisy.
In order to correctly determine the belonging of a lexical unit to the category of state, the student needs to know the rules well and practice by doing exercises. At the same time, in order not to confuse it with an adverb and a short adjective, you need to parse the word according to the morphological parsing scheme, indicating the syntactic role in the sentence.
