The basis of syntax (organisation of grammatical elements) is the fact that words of a language come in different classes or parts of speech: nouns, adjectives, prepositions and so on. Not all languages have the same word classes. English has articles like ‘a’ or ‘an’ and ‘the’. There is always a class which is made up of words referring to concrete objects; this is the class called ‘noun‘.
Similarly, there is a class which contains most of the words referring to actions, and that class is called ‘verb’. Nouns and verbs are not the only universal word classes. Many languages have a class of adjectives. These parts of speech or word classes are the building blocks for the formation of the basic types of sentence. In this chapter, you will be taken through the classes of both lexical and function words of the English language.
Major Families of Words
Lexical Words and Function Words Words as the basic elements of language can be categorised into two families, that is, according to their semantic content and grammatical behaviour. The main categories are: lexical words and function words.
Characteristics of Lexical Words
- They are the main carrier of meaning.
- They are divisible into word classes (noun, verbs, adjectives and adverbs).
- They constitute an open class of items, that is, their number could be added to regularly.
- Members of the class do not have a complex internal structure.
- Lexical words function as heads of phrases.
- Lexical words normally are the carriers of stress.
Characteristics of Function Words
- Function words are made up of such classes of words as articles: Prepositions, coordinators, auxiliary verbs (operators in modern grammar) and pronouns.
- They do not carry meanings by themselves but show how words relate to one another.
- Members of this set belong to a closed system. This means that new members are difficult to add to existing ones. For example, English has a limited number of articles ‘a’, or ‘an’ and ‘the’ in virtually any type of text.
Classes of Lexical Words
Lexical words are normally classified into nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Three criteria are normally employed in determining what class a word belongs to:
1) Morphological
This has to do with the form a word has (e.g., in terms of stem, prefixations and suffixations. Nouns have inflections for plural number and for genitive/possessive case.
2) Syntactic
This deals with what function a word performs when it finds itself in company of other words, that is, when it combines with other words in context to form stretches of utterances. While common nouns such as school, radio, and pen can be modified by many types of words before and/or after them, proper nouns like James, Janet, Aderemi, Saturday, Christmas rarely can.
3) Semantic
Here, we talk of what types of meaning a word conveys. Nouns commonly refer to concrete physical entities (people, objects and substances) e.g., ‘pen’ and ‘men’. Nouns can also denote abstract entities such as qualities and states, e.g., hope, intelligence and relationship.
Main Types of Nouns
1) Concrete vs. Abstract
Concrete Nouns
These refer to physical entities or substances. These are usually things that can be touched or felt. Examples of common nouns that are concrete are tables, cookers, houses, bottles, bags, and doors.
Abstract Nouns
These refer to abstractions such as events, states, times and qualities. These are usually concepts and ideas – such things that belong to the realm of imagination that cannot be touched, e.g., hope, success, time, growth, intellect, wisdom, laziness and beauty.
Note that the line between concrete and abstract nouns may be very thin such that whether we regard something as concrete or abstract may become debatable. Consider these examples:
(i) We need to have an inventory of things that have been supplied.
(ii) Hallucinatory drugs are said to make people who use them think of things.
2) Count vs. Non-count Nouns
Count nouns refer to entities which can be counted. That means they have singular and plural forms (a house, two houses. etc.).
Non-count nouns refer to things which cannot be counted, that is, they do not vary in number. They cannot occur with the indefinite article ‘a’ or ‘an’. Examples include water, milk, tea and salt.
Some nouns can both be count and non-count with a slightly different meaning. What we call countability is a matter of how we perceive the word. Consider such words as wine, time and sand. When we use the indefinite article ‘a’ or ‘an’ with non-count nouns, we usually signal the count sense but when they are omitted, we refer to the general abstraction. Consider the following:
(i) We need information in life to succeed.
(ii) A piece of information has been sent to your email box.
Although it has been said that non-count nouns usually do not occur in the plural, some characteristically appear in plural forms, for example, trousers and scissors.
3) Proper Nouns vs. Common Nouns
Proper nouns do not need an article or a plural form in that they only identify a particular person or place like Michael or lle-Ife. However, common nouns denote a class, for example, boy, town, book, and clock. Proper nouns are generally used in cases where the speaker and addressee know who is being referred to without further clarification. Proper nouns fall into some important categories:
(a) Personal names – Obama, Mandela, Soyinka and Abiola
(b) Place names – Nigeria, Abuja, Lagos and Enugu
(c) Organisation names – MTN, Peugeot, Nissan and NTA
(d) Time names – Sunday, October, Easter and Christmas
Proper names do not generally take a determiner. In spelling, proper nouns are marked by an initial capital letter.
Common nouns, as the name suggests, are the names of common objects which may be count or non-count. Common count nouns are entities such as: cow, house, milk, tea, drug, chair, cars and books.
Note : Proper nouns can sometimes have modifiers such as common nouns. A name may sometimes be preceded by ‘the’ as in these examples: the Sahara, the Gambia, the Johnson’s, the Americas, the Nile, the Titanic and the New York Times.
4) Collective Nouns
Collective nouns refer to a group of individuals, animals or items, e.g., staff, audience, team, flock, bunch, and crowd. All these nouns behave like ordinary count nouns varying in number: an army, the army, armies. We also find proper nouns naming official bodies or organisation, e.g., the Senate and the UN Assembly. Nouns like shoal, swarm, gang, mass, heap and pile are referred to as ‘of- collectives’ because they generally precede ‘of + plural noun’, where the plural noun names a set of people, animals or objects: shoal of fish, a swarm of bees, a gang of thieves, a mass of blood, a heap of sand and a pile of rubbish.
Verbs
Verbs perform a central function in clauses. They usually occur after the subject and they are the most important element in the clause structure because they determine the other clause element. Lexical verbs can also be referred to as full verbs. The class of lexical verbs is an open class which means the English language is always creating new lexical verbs. Look at the following examples:
(i) He came here yesterday.
(ii) The committee submitted a detailed report.
In the above examples, ‘came’ and ‘submitted’ are lexical verbs. Lexical verbs are much more prevalent than other types of verbs.
Phrasal Verbs
Phrasal verbs are multi-word units that function like a single verb. These combinations usually have idiomatic meaning. This means that they have meaning far and above the sum total of the individual words making up the expression. Phrasal verbs consist of a verb followed by an adverbial particle. Because of their idiomatic meaning, it is sometimes possible to replace phrasal verbs with a similar meaning. The following are examples:
Phrasal Verbs Single Words
look into investigate
fend off defend
call off cancel
go in for compete
watch out for notice
cut back reduce
touch back land
ask out invite
talk to persuade
Adjectives
Adjectives are lexical in function. They are very common but less common than nouns and verbs. Adjectives commonly modify nouns.
Characteristics of Adjectives
1) Morphological
Adjectives that are called central can be inflected to show comparative and superlative degrees, as in strong, stronger and strongest.
Syntactics serve both attributive and predicative roles. In an attributive position, an adjective forms part of a noun phrase. It comes before and modifies the noun phrase, for example, clement weather, shoddy performance, regulatory requirement, insensitive mistake, supersonic speed and international assignment. Predicative adjectives are not part of the noun phrase. They occur after the verb. For example: The case is interesting.
In the above, the adjective ‘înteresting‘ describes the subject ‘the case’. Also, predicative adjectives occur as object complement. For example: Everybody called him reckless.
Here, the adjective ‘reckless’ describes the object ‘him’.
2) Semantics
Central adjectives usually are descriptive, e.g., sharp, green, dull, sunny, good, scarce and expensive. In addition, they are gradable, that is, they can show different degrees of a quality. Gradable adjectives can take the comparative and superlative forms, e.g., late, later, latest, old, older and oldest.
Other Types
Many adjectives favor only attributive or predicative positions but not both. For example, ‘unable’ is used only predicatively, while ‘mere’ is used only attributively.
(i) Our schedule is tight; they may be unable to fit into it.
(ii) This is a mere case of blackmail.
Aside from functioning either attributively or predicatively, adjectives can also play a range of other roles, including functioning postpositively. An adjective that is part of a noun phrase and follows rather than precedes the head is said to be postposed (i.e., it is a post modifier). Postposed adjectives are common with indefinite pronoun heads, e.g., something interesting, someone intelligent, everyone concerned, details available, people involved, and anyone close.
Formation of Adjectives
New adjectives can be formed through the following morphological processes by adding ‘-ing’ participle to a verb form, e.g.,
- promise: promising
- interest: interesting
- bore: boring
- encourage: encouraging
By adding ‘-ed’ participle to a verb form, e.g.:
- complicate: complicated
- depress: depressed
- advance: advanced
- allege: alleged
By adding derivational suffixes:
Many adjectives are formed by the addition of suffixes, e.g., ‘-less’, ‘-ous’, ‘-ive’, ‘-al’, etc. Adjectives formed with the suffix ‘-al’ are by far more common than adjectives formed with any other suffix, e.g., adjectival, personal, accidental, medicinal, topical, and tactical. The suffix ‘-al’ is regarded as productive.
Adjectival Compounds
Compounds, when used as adjectives, lend themselves to compact information. Adjectival compounds come in a variety of ways. Adjectives can be added to other adjectives, e.g., reddish-brown. Compounds can also be comprised of an adjective plus a noun as with large-scale. Many adjective compounds involve participial forms, e.g., free-spending, best-selling, sweet-smelling, fuel-guzzling, white-washed, soft-spoken, ill-fated, tough-sounding, and mind-boggling.
Adverbs
Adverbials are clause elements that perform three main functions:
(a) They answer the questions where, when, how;
(b) They express the speaker’s/writer’s position or attitude;
(c) They link the clause to some other units of discourse.
For example:
(i) He hates working in the garden (where).
(ii) They agreed to leave in the morning (when).
(iii) The committee pledged to work conscientiously (how).
Forms realizing adverbials
(a) adverbs, e.g., here, soon, usually;
(b) prepositional phrases, e.g., in due course, in all honesty, along the road, on the whole;
(c) clauses, e.g., as soon as he came, because he did not turn up.
Position of Adverbials
Adverbials can occur in a variety of positions in the clause. Three main positions can be identified:
(a) Initial: The adverbial is in the first position in the clause, occurring before the subject or other obligatory elements of the clause, e.g.:
(i) Here lies the remains of the former king.
(ii) Away the bird flew.
(b) Medial: By the medial position, we mean that the adverbial can be placed between the subject and the beginning of the main verb, e.g.:
(i) I definitely said other things.
The adverbial can also occur between the operator and the main verb, e.g.: He has often complained about the condition of the engine.
(c) Final: The adverbial occurs after the predicator element in an intransitive clause or after the object in a transitive clause, e.g.:
(i) He works in a foreign country. (intransitive)
(ii) He gave a lecture at the institute. (transitive)
Many adverbs favor occurring in the final position. Moving them to a position other than final is a marked choice, that is, for purposes of emphasis.
Categories of Adverbials
Adverbials can be categorized into the following groups:
- Place: here, in Lagos, across the road
- Manner: well, stylishly, carelessly, rudely
- Instrument: with a cutlass
- Time: at noon, daily, seldom, always
- Agent: by virtue, by the authority
- Means: by car, by sheer luck, through the help of friends
Multiple adverbials can occur in a clause. Consider the following example:
When the robbers arrived at the bank, the first thing they did, as usual, was to go straight to the vault, where they knew the bulk of the money was kept, after which they started searching the customers.
Formation of Adverbials
Adverbs are often recognized as words with typically an ‘-ly’ ending. However, this morphological criterion is not true of many adverbs because the class is diverse in form. Four main categories are identifiable.
a) Simple Adverbs
Simple adverbs are not derived from other words. For example, fast, there, often, soon. A simple adverb form can also be used as another part of speech. Well and fast, for example, can be used as an adjective as well as an adverb.
b) Complex Adverbs
Complex adverbs are made up of at least two morphological forms and are sometimes referred to as compound adverbs because they are formed by combining two or more elements into a single word. Examples of complex adverbs are: anyway (any+way); nowhere (not+where); heretofore (here+to+fore); somehow (some+how) and somewhat (some+what).
c) Adverbs Derived from Suffixation
Suffixing ‘-ly’ to an adjective will result in the formation of many adverbs such as:
- Wisely from the adjective wise.
- Honestly from the adjective honest.
- Attitudinally from the adjective attitudinal.
However, not all words ending in ‘-ly’ are adverbs, as the following example illustrates: It is a comparatively simple method.
The ‘-ly’ is very productive in forming new adverbs. This feature makes it possible to use it in forming even some unusual adverbs in speech and writing. e.g.: The party went on jollily for hours.
Apart from ‘-ly’, other common suffixes used to form adverbs are ‘-wise’ and ‘-ward(s)’. Both forms can be added to nouns, for example, characterwise, speechwise, partywise, and northward, homeward, and skyward.
d) Fixed Phrases
Finally, there are some words that occur together as fixed phrases and are used as such. These are sequences of words that cannot be varied. In the way they are used, each word in the phrase no longer has a separate meaning of its own. Examples of such phrases include: of course, sort of, at last, kind of, by the way, and in like manner.
