This text is taken from a children's reader. It's about some children who find a doll house that is an exact reproduction of their home.
Biff opened the little house. Everyone looked inside. "It looks like our house inside," said Biff.
A student of English as a Foreign Language asked me what part of speech the inside in "It looks like our house inside," is.
I answered that it was an adverb of place, but it strikes me that there's something wrong with this sentence. My intuition is that the problem is that look is a stative verb. Can anyone confirm this? Is there a rule in English grammar that adverbs of place cannot be added to stative verbs?
Best Answer
It's a perfectly grammatical construction to me.
Just as you suspected, "inside" is being used as an adverb. It's similar to:
or,
I'm not sure what your worry is about stative verbs and adverbs combining, because there's an object after the preposition "like" anyway. And even if there weren't, it would still be possible:
My own examples: