ENG 210: ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH SENTENCE STRUCTURE

LECTURE 1:
WORD-CLASSES IN STRUCTUAL GRAMMAR: THE MORPHOLOGICAL APPROACH
As specified in the course outline, this course is divided into three sections. Section 1 is taught by Mr.
Adedara, section 2 by Professor Bamiro, while section 3 is taught by Dr. Ademola-Adeoye. In this section
of the course, we will focus on Word-Classes and Syntactic Analysis in Modern Grammars. What are
these modern grammars? Modern grammars arose as a reaction to the problems in traditional
grammar. I believe Mr. Adedara has acquainted you with some of the weaknesses of traditional
grammar. The four major modern grammars are American structural grammar, the London School of
Linguistics, Transformational Grammar, and Systemic-Functional Grammar. We will concentrate on
American structural grammar. Please note that we have covered much of the material in this lecture.
However, the following notes provide you the opportunity to revise what we discussed in class.

On word-classes (with particular reference to the content words in English [that is nouns, verbs,
adjectives, and adverbs]), structural grammar adopts two approaches in defining the parts of speech in
English. Firstly, structural grammar, rejecting the notional approach of traditional grammar, attempts to
define the parts of speech according to form or morphology: this is known as the formal or
morphological approach. Thus, nouns are words which can be inflected for the plural and for the
genitive as in the following paradigm: “boy” (nominative singular); “boys” (nominative plural); “boy’s”
(possessive singular); “boys’” (possessive plural). Verbs are words which can be inflected for the simple
present, past tense, and so on, as the following paradigm: “go” = the zero form, i.e. simple present;
‘goes’ = -s form, i.e. 3rd person singular; “going” = -ing form, i.e. continuous tense; “went” = -ed form, i.e.
past tense; “gone” = -ed form, past participle. Adjectives are word types with a set of paradigmatic
forms which include three forms: the null (0); the comparative (-er); and the superlative (-est). The
formal definition is as follows: an adjective is a word that has three forms which correspond to the
paradigm: sad, sadder, saddest; or good, better, best. Adverbs are said to have structural characteristics
based on two paradigms. The first is inflectional paradigm. According to this paradigm, in a few cases,
adverbs admit the comparative and superlative degree endings ‘-er’ and ‘-est’, but they usually make
use of the function words ‘more’ and ‘most’ for this purpose. Consider the following examples: “He
drove fastest”; “He works hardest”. Some adverbs have a base form that also serves as an adjective, for
example: “He drove fast”; “he works hard”. The other is the derivational paradigm. The most common
adverb-marking suffix is the ‘-ly’ added to adjectives. We will call a word an adverb, then, if it meets all
three of the following morphological conditions: (1) It must be a word with the ‘-ly’ derivational ending;
(2) Before the addition of the ‘-ly’ morpheme, the word must have been the null form of an adjective,
for example, “quick”, “sad”, “swift”; (3) After the addition of the ‘-ly’, the word will not fit into any
paradigmatic series. That is, it can now assume only one form. In Lecture 2, we will examine word-
classes with reference to the functional approach in structural grammar.