The category of state is a special part of speech

In the school course of the Russian language, the words denoting the state are studied. School children often confuse them with adverbs and adjectives, although they have differences.

A category of state is words whose morphological features allow us to refer them to adverbs, because they answer the questions "what?" And How?" And are designed to describe emotions or moods of animate objects or physical processes associated with inanimate objects and their habitat or location. For example: The house was uneasy .

But not so long ago, impersonal predicates, or predicates - another name that carries the words of the category of state - some linguists began to consider an independent part of speech. But at the same time among scientists there is no unity in the question of the criteria for belonging to it. The words, its constituents, are not grammatically heterogeneous. Sometimes it includes short forms of the names of adjectives, not fully used. For example: I must, I should, I'm glad, etc.

The category of state is expressed by words, which are most often in impersonal sentences by the main members and occupy an independent position. They designate 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 soul (category of state);

2. Quietly and smoothly flowing river (adverb);

3. The animal is calm (a short name is an adjective).

The status category has the following distinguishing features: first, it refers to 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. The shade is cool and damp .

(Habitat status: cool, damp, light, warm, etc.)

2. It hurts

(Physiological sensations of living beings: audible, not visible, painful, crowded and stuffy, etc.)

3. Ah! How joyful !

(Emotional states of a person: offensive, joyful, scary, annoying and sorry, etc.)

4. It's a sin not to see this!

(Modal categories: sin, you need, you can not, you can, etc.)

5. We got up early .

(Spatial as well as temporal characteristics: late, early, far, near, high).

If the category of state (examples are given below) describes animate objects, then their names are expressed by the dative case form. If - the natural environment, then its name is often represented in the form of a prepositional case. For example:

1. One is bad (one - DP, the name of the person).

2. In summer the park is shady and cool (in the park - PP, the name of the natural environment object).

Predicates have permanent and unstable morphological characters. The constant category is their immutability. And the impermanent is the degree of comparison in those words that were formed from qualitative adjectives. For example:

The south side is warmer .

The syntactic role of the words of the category of state is limited to the predicate in one-part impersonal sentences.

1. Although difficult , but we must go forward!

2. How quiet all around!

Often predicates are used together with the words "will" and "happened", "it became" and "it was," "it becomes" and "happens", 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 status category, the student needs to know the rules well and practice by performing the exercises. Moreover, in order not to confuse it with an adverb and a short adjective, we need to parse the word according to the scheme of morphological analysis, indicating the syntactic role in the sentence.