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Q) She is much liked by everybody.
This is about the possibility of using degree adverb to participial adjectives and verb participles.
In this sentence, is 'liked' used as a participial adjective? or a verb participle?
The answer in this book is that 'liked' is used as a participial adjective, so it can be modified by the degree adverb 'much'. However, there is a explicit personal agent 'everybody', so I think it should be a verb participle.
A 'participle' is a verb form that is nonfinite and an adjective or adverb. So, "liked" is certainly both a "participle verb form" and a "participle adjective" as well! Those can both be true, and are both true in this sentence.
"Liked" is /not/ a finite verb form here, and 'everybody' is not its subject!
This is a little confusing, because "liked" spelled just the same can be a past tense finite verb form with a subject, sometimes:
Everybody liked her.
Here, unlike you example sentence, "liked" is not a participle.
But in your sentence, it is a participle, and your book is correct that the use of 'much' is permitted because of this.
So, "by everyone" is a just a prepositional phrase. Compare the following sentences, which are grammatically identical:
She is liked by everyone.
The soup is cooked with wine.
It should be clear that "wine" is not a verb subject. The wine is certainly not doing the cooking. But the grammar is exactly the same in both sentences - "everyone" is not a verb subject either in the first sentence.
She is much liked by everybody.
The degree AdvP "much" indicates that "liked" is an adjective here. If it was a verb, the active counterpart would be the ungrammatical *"Everybody much likes her".
The clause does have a by phrase with "everybody", but such phrases are permitted in adjectival passives when the meaning of the corresponding verb is stative, as it is in your example (the verb "like" is stative).
Compare also "Ed was worried by the prospect of redundancy", where "worried is an adjective because the corresponding verb "worry" has a stative meaning.
Edit: there's a lot of confusion about participles and whether they are verbs or adjectives. The simplest way round this is to use the term 'participial adjective' for the adjectives, reserving the term 'participle'for the verbs.
