He was there.
In this sentence is ' there ' an adverb?
I get very confused when I have to identify parts of speech.
Any help would be appreciated.
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2Possible duplicate of 'What part of speech does “here” have in “I am here”?' See J Lawler's answer. But 'there' in 'He was there' is a distal locative (some would add 'intransitive preposition'). But many people still consider it in the 'adverb' class. – Edwin Ashworth Nov 22 '19 at 14:47
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@tchrist Hmm. Here is proximal, there is distal. In any case ljawler's answer in the linked-to page only gives its syntactic function (predicate), not its PoS. On the other hand here is a page which actually deals with there, not here and does, in fact address the question of PoS! Could we change the dupe it's linked to, by any chance, please? – Araucaria - Him Nov 22 '19 at 15:24
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That's a very interesting tack that CGEL takes, defining here and there as mostly intransitive prepositions. It sort of works. But it really just points to the irrelevance of wanting a POS label for every possible word. POS are useful only for substantive words, and not even always even then. Anything that can get caught in the machinery just needs a part number, not a designation. – John Lawler Nov 23 '19 at 18:03