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Why can't "asleep" be classified as a verb? English verbs include first of all the general implicit meaning (the lexico-grammatical nature) of the verb which serves to convey verbiality, i. e. different kinds of activity (go, read, skate), various processes (boil, grow, obtain), the inner state of a person (feel, bother, worry), possession (have, possess), etc. The meaning of word asleep is also connected with action and process. Why can’t it be classified as a verb?

olyapopovich
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2 Answers2

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In English, verbs are words that take certain endings and can appear in certain constructions.

Verbs like sleep, go, own, or be have special forms:

  • sleep, sleeps, slept, sleeping
  • go, goes, went, gone, going
  • own, owns, owned, owning
  • be, am, is, are, was, were, been, being

that don't occur for other predicates

  • *She asleeps, *She aslept, *She has aslept, *She was asleeping.

Asleep is an adjective that's formed from the verb sleep. Adjectives can be predicates (they're called predicate adjectives in that case), but adjectives can't take the endings that verbs can, so they have to use an auxiliary verb be that can be inflected. The same is true of predicate noun phrases like a doctor or solid rock

  • That man is asleep/tired/tiring/dead/here/purple.
  • That building is a clinic/solid rock/a monstrosity.

So that's why asleep can't be a verb; it's already an adjective, and it can't work like a verb.

John Lawler
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  • When he found her, oh then they fell a-kissing. As I was awalking, I saw a baby who was asleeping. – phoog Apr 04 '16 at 23:01
  • More seriously, I would argue that asleep was formed from the noun sleep, like ashore, astern, and atop. – phoog Apr 04 '16 at 23:07
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    For some creators, probly it was. For others, not. It doesn't get created once in a puff of smoke; it's a very gradual process, over hundreds of years, millions of people, and trillions of individual oral uses of asleep to get to our present state of affairs. Which is changing at a glacial rate even as we discuss this. – John Lawler Apr 05 '16 at 11:58
  • +1 . Just to be devil's advocate for the sake of talking about grammar a bit more (which is why I come here), there is the case of She was asleeping and so forth .... – Araucaria - Him Apr 06 '16 at 23:26
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    That's the regional a- participle prefix Froggy would a-courting go, He's a-feared of snakes, etc. A-prefixing is known in Appalachian speech groups, and there's a big literature about it in sociolinguistics. – John Lawler Apr 07 '16 at 02:28
  • I would add that A-prefixing doesn't have much to do with "asleep," if anything. But I still don't see how anyone would form "asleep" from the verb. Do we have any other examples of verbs taking an a- prefix to form an adjective? The a- prefix here seems to be related to the preposition "at": she is at sleep; she is at shore; she is at (the) top, etc. I also wonder whether this is related to above, around, about, etc. (prefixed versions of over, round, out, etc.). – phoog Apr 13 '16 at 14:57
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'Asleep' is equivalent to the participle 'sleeping'. Neither one is a verb. They are adjectives. They do refer to an action, but 'asleep' (or 'at sleep') does it in an irregular way.

AmI
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    "Sleeping" is clearly a verb in "The baby is sleeping peacefully"; it's a gerund-participle verb-form and head of the non-finite clause "sleeping peacefully". It can't be an adjective because you can't say *"very sleeping peacefully" – BillJ Apr 04 '16 at 20:25
  • @BillJ - But one could properly say "The baby is asleep peacefully". – Hot Licks Apr 04 '16 at 21:01
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    @Hot Licks Yes, but "asleep" is an adjective that can take post-head modifiers in the form of a adverbs. But "sleeping" can't be an adjective because it can't occur as complement to complex-intransitive verbs like *"She became/seemed sleeping", and as I mentioned before, it can't be modified by "very". Some participles, though, can also be adjectives, like "entertaining" for example, which can be complement to both complex-intransitive verbs: "It became quite entertaining", and complex-transitive verbs: "I found it quite entertaining" – BillJ Apr 04 '16 at 21:27
  • @BillJ - Many words can be used as different and diverse parts of speech. In many cases the nit-picking about what the construct "is someword" actually is is only a tap-dance around the fact that English grammar is quite imprecise and subject to interpretation. – Hot Licks Apr 04 '16 at 21:31
  • @BillJ - 'sleeping' is a verbal, not a verb. It can't be intensified because it is already as highly 'focused' as it can be. 'is sleeping' and 'is asleep' are both verb phrases, but the 'verb' is 'is'. There is quite a difference between how verb phrases are built (messy) and how they are stored. – AmI Apr 04 '16 at 21:43
  • @Aml verbal is an adjective, not a noun. – phoog Apr 04 '16 at 22:59
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    @AmI The baby is sleeping peacefully is simply a progressive construction, comprising the usual verb "be" + present participle. It is no different to Ed is walking briskly and Kim was writing a novel. "Walking", "writing" and "sleeping" are clearly present participle verb-forms. There is no possibility of them being anything else. – BillJ Apr 05 '16 at 08:13
  • 'Adjective' and 'adverbial' are also adjectives, not nouns; but I use them as nouns. I also reject the term 'present participle', as there is nothing 'present' in 'the baby was sleeping'. In 'the sleeping baby' the 'progressive participle' is used as an adjective. In 'the baby is sleeping' the 'progressive participle' comes from applying the progressive aspect: suffix 'ing' to the 1st verbal and then prepend the word 'be' {which is changed to 'is' by the agreement process}. -- 'Asleep' is clearly not a verb, but does it imply 'sleeping'? – AmI Apr 07 '16 at 17:08