Adjective

The first scholar who undertook this kind of re-consider­ation of the lexemic status of English statives was L. S. Barkhudarov, and in our estimation of them we essentially fol­low his principles, pointing out some additional criteria of argument.

First, considering the basic meaning expressed by the stative, we formulate it as "stative property", i.e. a kind of property of a noun

al referent. As we already know, the adjective as a whole signifies not "quality" in the narrow sense, but "property", which is categorially divided into "substantive quality as such" and "substantive relation". In this respect, statives do not fundamentally differ from classical adjectives. Moreover, common adjectives and partici­ples in adjective-type functions can express the same, or, more specifically, typologically the same properties (or "qual­ities" in a broader sense) as are expressed by statives.

Indeed, the main meaning types conveyed by statives are:

the psychic state of a person (afraid, ashamed, aware); the physical state of a person (astir, afoot); the physical state of an object (afire, ablaze, aglow); the state of an object in space (askew, awry, aslant). Meanings of the same order are rendered by pre-positional adjectives. Cf.:

the living predecessor — the predecessor alive; eager curi­osity — curiosity agog; the burning house — the house afire; a floating raft — a raft afloat; a half-open door — a door adjar; slanting ropes — ropes aslant; a vigilant man — a man awake;

similar cases — cases alike; an excited crowd — a crowd astir.

It goes without saying that many other adjectives and participles convey the meanings of various states irrespective of their analogy with statives. Cf. such words of the order of psychic state as despondent, curious, happy, joyful; such words of the order of human physical state as sound, refreshed, healthy, hungry; such words of the order of activity state as busy, functioning, active, employed, etc.

Second, turning to the combinability characteristics of statives, we see that, though differing from those of the com­mon adjectives in one point negatively, they basically coin­cide with them in the other points. As a matter of fact, sta­tives are not used in attributive pre-position. but, like ad­jectives, they are distinguished by the left-hand categorial combinability both with nouns and link-verbs. Cf.:

The household was nil astir.——The household was all excited — It was strange to see (the household active at this hour of the day.— It was strange to see the household active at this hour of the day.

Third, analysing the functions of the stative correspond­ing to its combinability patterns, we see that essentially they do not differ from the functions of the common ad­jective. Namely, the two basic functions of the stative are the predicative and the attribute. The similarity of functions leads to the possibility of the use of a stative and a common adjective in a homogeneous group. E.g.: Launches and barges moored to the dock were ablaze and loud with wild sound.

True, the predominant function of the stative, as differ­ent from the common adjective, is that of the predicative. But then, the important structural and functional peculiari­ties of statives uniting them in a distinctly separate set of lexemes cannot be disputed. What is disputed is the status of this set in relation to the notional parts of speech, not its existence or identification as such.

Fourth, from our point of view, it would not be quite consistent with the actual lingual data to place the stative strictly out of the category of comparison. As we have shown above, the category of comparison is connected with the func­tional division of adjectives into evaluative and specificative, Like common adjectives, statives are subject to this flexible division, and so in principle they are included into the expression of the quantitative estimation of the corre­sponding properties conveyed by them. True, statives do not take the synthetical forms of the degrees of comparison, but they are capable of expressing comparison analytically, in cases where it is to be expressed.

Cf.: Of us all, Jack was the one most aware of the delicate situation in which we found ourselves. I saw that the adjust­ing lever stood far more askew than was allowed by the di­rections.

Fifth, quantitative considerations, though being a sub­sidiary factor of reasoning, tend to support the conjoint part-of-speech interpretation of statives and common adjectives. Indeed, the total number of statives does not exceed several dozen (a couple of dozen basic, "stable" units and, probably, thrice as many "unstable" words of the nature of coinages for the nonce). This num­ber is negligible in comparison with the number of words of the otherwise identified notional parts of speech, each of them counting thousands of units. Why, then, an honour of the part-of-speech status to be granted to a small group of words not differing in their fundamental lexico-grammatical features from one of the established large word-classes?

As for the set-forming prefix a-, it hardly deserves a se­rious consideration as a formal basis of the part-of-speech identification of statives simply because formal features cannot be taken in isolation from functional features. More­over, as is known, there are words of property not distinguished by this prefix, which display essential functional character­istics inherent in the stative set. In particular, here belong such adjectives as ill, well, glad, sorry, worth (while), subject (to), due (to), underway, and some others. On the other hand, among the basic statives we find such as can hardly be ana­lysed into a genuine combination of the type "prefix + root", because their morphemic parts have become fused into one indivisible unit in the course of language history, e.g. aware, afraid, aloof.

Thus, the undertaken semantic and functional analysis shows that statives, though forming a unified set of words, do not constitute a separate lexemic class existing in lan­guage on exactly the same footing as the noun, the verb, the adjective, the adverb; rather it should be looked upon as a subclass within the general class of adjectives. It is essentially an adjectival subclass, because, due to their pe­culiar features, statives are not directly opposed to the no­tional parts of speech taken together, but are quite particu­larly opposed to the rest of adjectives. It means that the gen­eral subcategorization of the class of adjectives should be effected on the two levels: on the upper level the class will be divided into the subclass of stative adjectives and com­mon adjectives; on the lower level the common adjectives fall into qualitative and relative, which division has been discussed in the foregoing paragraph.

As we see, our final conclusion about the lexico-grammatical nature of statives appears to have returned them into the lexemic domain in which they were placed by traditional grammar and from which they were alienated in the course of subsequent linguistic investigations. A question then arises, whether these investigations, as well as the discussions accompanying them, have served any rational purpose at all.

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