In the school course of the Russian language, the words denoting the state are studied. Pupils often confuse them with adverbs and adjectives, although they have differences.
The category of condition is words whose morphological features make it possible to attribute them to adverbs, because they answer the questions “what?” And How?" and designed to describe the emotions or mood of animate objects or physical processes associated with inanimate objects and their habitat or location. For example: The house was restless .
But not so long ago, impersonal predicates, or predicates - another name that state category words carry - some linguists began to consider as 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, must, glad, etc.
The category of condition is expressed in words that are most often found in impersonal sentences by the main members and occupy an independent position. They denote a static situation and have homonyms, so it is difficult to distinguish them from adverbs and short forms of adjectives. For instance:
1. He has a calm mind (category of condition);
2. The river (dialect) flows calmly and smoothly;
3. The animal is calm (short name adjective).
The category of condition has the following distinctive features: firstly, it describes 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 instance:
1. The shade is cool and damp .
(habitat condition: cool, damp, light, warm, etc.)
2. He is hurt
(physiological sensations of living things: audible, invisible, painful, cramped and stuffy, etc.)
3. Ah! How joyful !
(emotional states of a person: insulting, joyful, scary, annoying and sorry, etc.)
4. Sin not to see this!
(modal categories: sin, necessary, impossible, possible, etc.)
5. We got up early .
(spatial as well as temporal characteristics: late, early, far, close, high).
If the category of condition (examples are given below) describes animate objects, then their names are expressed in the form of the dative case. If it’s a natural environment, then its name is often presented in the form of a prepositional case. For instance:
1. One is bad (one - D.p., name of person).
2. In summer , the park is shady and cool (in the park - Pp, the name of the natural environment).
Predicates have constant and inconsistent morphological characters. A permanent category is their immutability. And inconstant is the degree of comparison of those words that were formed from high-quality adjectives. For instance:
The south side is warmer .
The syntactic role of state category words is limited to the predicate in one-part impersonal sentences.
1. Though difficult , we must go forward!
2. How quiet around!
Often predicates are used along with the words “will” and “happened”, “became” and “was”, “will” and “happens”, etc. For instance:
1. But it was quiet.
2. It used to be noisy.
In order to correctly determine whether a lexical unit belongs to the category of state, a student needs to know the rules well and practice doing the exercises. Moreover, in order not to confuse it with an adverb and a short adjective, you need to parse the word according to the scheme of morphological analysis, indicating the syntactic role in the sentence.