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there are very few modal words that have developed from verbs,
compare: maybe.

4. Words of the category of state (statives or ad links)

In modern English there exists a certain class of words
such as asleep, alive, afloat, which is characterized by:
1) the lexico-grammatical meaning of “state”. He is asleep=He is
in a state of sleep;
2) the productive prefix a-: swim – aswim, shiver – ashiver,etc;
3) peculiar combinability: words of this class are associated
almost exclusively with link-verbs: to be alive, to fall asleep, etc.;
4) the main syntactic function of the predicative complement.
A class of words united by such features may be regarded as
a separate part of speech. B. O. Ilysh has called it “a category of
state”. V. V. Vinogradov, for example, calls them “words of the
category of state”, though many linguists object to their being
considered a separate part of speech. Other Russian linguist
B. Khaimovich and B. Rogovskaya use a hardier term “ad links”
by analogy with adverbs. English ad links do not have grammatical
categories. The peculiar feature of the Ukrainian language
concerning the state expression is the fact that here the state is
represented as something closer to the action and is rendered with
the help of words, meant to express the action, that is verbs.
The question of singling out the category of state as a
separate part of speech has not been finally solved yet by
Ukrainian grammarians. B. M. Kulyk treats positively the issue
concerning singling out the category of state in Ukrainian and
includes into this class the following groups of words:
1) words expressing the mental and physical states of a
person or of any living creature altogether, e.g. боязко, приємно,
страшно, чутно, шкода and others;
2) words denoting the nature state: темно, зелено,
барвисто;

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