INTRODUCTION
A group refers to a set of more than one word. It can function as any part of speech or sentence element. The group is also called a phrase. For example, the verb ‘dance’ is a single word verb but the groups “is dancing, has danced, would have danced” are verb phrases. Similarly there are noun phrases, prepositional phrases, adjectival phrases when more than one word is involved. But except for a verb phrase, any group of words that has no subject and no finite (main) verb is called a phrase.
Phrases are called by the classes of words to which they belong. They are also called by the word class to which the most important word in the phrase belongs as shown in the following examples.
(a) The good woman – noun phrase
(b) beautiful and healthy – adjectival phrase
(c) On the table – prepositional phrase
(d) Last week – adverbial phrase
(e) has been called – verb phrase.
3.1 Kinds of Phrases
Prepositional Phrase
A prepositional phrase consists of the preposition and its object. Sometimes a noun which serves as the object of the preposition has modifiers but the important words are the preposition and the object. Study the following examples:
1. She strolled round the building.
(Preposition) (Object)
2, The girl in the black lace is a law student.
(Preposition) (Object)
In sentence No.1 for instance the preposition is round, the object is the building while the prepositional phrase is round the building.
A prepositional phrase usually functions as an adjective or an adverb. Since adjectives and adverbs modify, the prepositional phrase is also a modifier.
Adjectival Phrase
An adjectival phrase is a prepositional phrase that modifies a noun or pronoun. It often functions as an adjective. The following examples contain adjectival phrases.
3. The man at the gate opened the door for me.
4. They took the road near the market.
In No. 3, the prepositional phrase at the gate modifies the noun gate while the prepositional phrase near the market modifies the noun road in No.4. An adjectival phrase, also called adjective phrase, may follow the noun it describes or it may be used as a predicate adjective after a linking verb as in the following examples:
5 She wore a wrapper with blue beads.
6 The injured girl was in a coma.
7 He drove in a cream coloured car.
8 The woman was in a terrible rage.
Notice that in the above examples the prepositional phrases in Nos.5 and 7 follow linking verbs and therefore function as predicate adjectives while the ones in Nos. 4 and 6 follow the nouns which they describe.
Adverbial Phrases:
An adverbial phrase is also a prepositional phrase which performs the functions of an adverb: modifying a verb, an adjective, or another adverb. Like the adverb, the adverbial phrase answers the questions when? where, how? and to what extent? Adverbial phrases express additional ideas about the verb such as time, place, manner and degree as in the following examples:
9 I shall come in the evening (time).
10 The children played in the field (place).
11 Write your name in capital letters (manner)
12 He withdrew from school because of financial problems (reason).
In No. 9, the adverbial phrase modifies the verb shall come. It gives information about the time that I will come. In No. 10, the adverbial phrase modifies the verb played saying where the children played while the adverbial phrases in Nos11 and 12 modify the verbs write and withdraw respectively. In No. 11, the adverbial phrase gives information about how or in what manner the name is to be written and in No. 12, the adverbial phrase gives the reason why he withdrew from school.
Adverbial phrases which modify adjectives and adverbs are not always so easy to identify. As a guide, the adverbial phrase that modifies an adjective often follows that adjective as in the following examples.
The woman looked frightened of the man.
She was therefore ready at any time.
Note also that a preposition is not always a single word as in the following.
I packed the car in front of our house.
The professor resigned on account of his political appointment.
Noun Phrase
The noun Phrase contains a noun a modifier and sometimes a qualifier. These together constitute the nominal group. At other times, a noun phrase contains nouns joined by a conjunction. The following are examples of noun phrases:
Esther and Naomi;
The students of the Department of English;
My elder sister and her friends;
From the three examples above it can be seen that some noun phrases have modifiers while some do not have modifiers. The noun phrase can serve as a substitute for a noun and perform the functions often performed by nouns (See Module 2: Unit 6).
3.2 Group Structure
The Nominal Group
The nominal group has a minimum of one and a maximum of three elements: modifier, head and qualifier usually represented by the letters m h q alternatively referred to as premodifier, head, and postmodifier. The head is usually the noun in the group. The head may have a modifier alone as in; that woman, the tree, a table, some water. It may have a head and a qualifier: women of our church, trees in the garden. It may have all three as in the following (m h q):
The women of our church;
m h q
The trees in the garden;
m h q
A table in the centre of the room
m h q
Of the three elements, the head is the compulsory one. The modifier and the qualifier are optional elements. This information can be summarised as follows: (m) h (q). Each nominal group has a structure. In a nominal group there may be many modifiers and qualifiers but usually, there is one head which may be single or compound.
The m Element
We can have a zero modifier element in a construction that begins with the head e.g
Women of our church.
Where there are modifier elements, we can have a maximum of eleven modifier elements though in real life it is never necessary to use more than three or four e.g.
The tall beautiful young woman
m m m m h
beautiful young woman
m m h
young woman
m h
Note that the reduction of the number of pre-head modifiers does not create structural or meaning problems because each modifier modifies the head.
How is this example different from the others?
Note that in the last example all the elements together modify the head whereas in the previous examples each of the elements individually modifies the head. A structure in which all the elements together modify the head is called a univariate structure as opposed to a multivariate structure where each element modifies the h element. The difference is that in a univariate structure each entry of the m element describes the one in front of it.
Patterning of m Element DOEN
There can be many elements within the m element. These include:
- Deictic elements which locate the speaker in space and time e.g this, that, those;
- Ordinals e.g One, two, second, fourth etc.
- Epithet which indicates attributes e.g. young, old, beautiful,
- Nominals e.g cane, wooden etc.
Usually, the deictic elements come first followed by ordinals, epithets and nominals as in the following (DOEN):
m m m m h
My first fine leather bag
Deictic ordinal epithet nominal
noun
Occasionally we can have up to two determiners within the deictic system and as many as five adjectives and two nominals in addition to the usual possibilities within the m element as in the following example:
All the first three beautiful long woven African cane chairs.
m m m m m m m m m h
The h Element
The h element is usually a noun. It must be present before we can claim to have a nominal group. The h element also determines the nature of the qualifier in terms of concord and meaning as in the following:
The beds are
John talked
*The book talked (unacceptable except ‘book’ is used in a special
way)
We can have single and compound elements e.g
Uyo,
The city of Uyo
In the above example, Uyo and city form a compound because they are
coreferential i.e. they function as appositives
Other compound elements include:
Bread and butter
Rice and stew
It is important to note that compound h elements take singular verbs like single h elements.
The q Element
The q element usually comes after the h element. The term qualifier is said to have emanated from scale and category grammar (Eka, 1994, p 94). The q element can be a single word (often an adjective, a pronoun or an adverb for example:
Someone special (adjective)
h q
Helen herself
h q (reflexive pronoun)
The house across the road (adverb)
The q element can sometimes be a phrase or a group as in the following:
The girl in the blue dress (is my niece).
m h q
A house to live in (is what I need).
m h q
Sometimes qualifiers co-occur to function as double or multiple
qualifiers as in:
Thomas/ my eldest brother/ the livewire of the family (came home).
h q q
All/ the/houses/ that my father built/ which we never lived in
m m h q q
(were rented as government offices).
Constructions in which many qualifiers co-occur are said to be recursive: showing repetitions of patterns (sometimes in a layered manner) as in the above examples. At other times they are said to co- occur in a linear manner as in the example below:
Okon, driver, businessman, politician etc. (is very clever)
Structure of the Verbal Group
The verbal group is the predicator element in a clause whether it operates in a dependent or independent clause. The primary structure of the verbal group consists of one or more than one possible elements: the auxiliary often represented as x and the head often represented as h.
The size of the verbal group depends on the nature of the utterance. There may be only one auxiliary verb, in which case it will serve as the head which is normally a compulsory element, as for instance, in the following:
He may
Which may be interpreted to mean ‘he may come/ do it / go’ etc. At other times, there may be just be main verb. e.g
He /plays /football
In this case the main verb serves as the head.
Two factors determine the structure of the verbal group – the size of the verbal group and the nature of the composition. Thus, the verbal group in English may be simple, compound, complex and compound complex. A simple verbal group has just one item usually the head the main verb (h)
She wrote the letter (h)
Note that the single item may also be an auxiliary as in:
I can
I could
A complex verbal group has the structure (x h i.e. auxiliary + head) e.g
She has taken the examination.
There can be an extension of the verbal group through the increase of
the number of x elements as in the following:
She must have taken the examination.
She might have been helped by her sister.
A compound verbal group has two or more heads joined or not by a
conjunction or not as in
I came, saw and conquered
The child was frightened, screamed, ran to safety.
A compound complex verbal group has a minimum of an auxiliary and two heads as in the following:
The lecturer should teach and examine.
x h h
The actor had appeared, disappeared and reappeared.
x h h h
Structure of the Adverbial Group
The structure of the adverbial group maybe summarized as follows:
It can consist of only the head as in
Jane danced gracefully (head)
It can be made of an intensifier and head as for example in
Her brother runs very fast (intensifier plus head)
It can comprise of a head and an intensifier as in:
She writes legibly enough (head + intensifier)
It can consist of an intensifier, a head and an intensifier as in
He did very well indeed (intensifier + head + intensifier).
Sometimes there can be multiple intensifiers as in the following:
The dancers performed very very beautifully indeed
(intensifier + intensifier + head + intensifier).
At times there can be a head within the structure as in
She should come as soon as possible (head-underlined within the structure)
He spoke more brilliantly than I expected (head underlined
within the structure)
Structure of the Adjectival Group
The structure of the adjectival group can be summarized as follows:
The adjectival group can consist of an intensifier and a head as in:
Very good, quite satisfactory (Intensifier + Head)
It can also be made up of a head and an intensifier as in:
good enough, happy indeed (Head + Intensifier)
Sometimes there may be more than one intensifier as in
very good indeed, certainly good enough
(intensifier + head + intensifier)
The adjectival group can also have a determiner and a head as in:
an amiable (person); the best (solution) (Determiner + Head). Sometimes there can be a head and a qualifier as in:
difficult to understand, easy to get on with (Head +qualifier)
When adjectives occur in a row all the adjectives precede the noun head as in the following:
a very beautiful young woman
a fashionable old looking green Senegalese gown
Usually the adjectives follow the following order:
Determiner/other adjectives/size/age/participle/colour/place of
origin/material/head as shown below:
det other Adj.
a very
size
long
participle
looking
colour
blue
place
of origin Senegalese
material Head
boubou
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE (SAE) 1
What is common between a prepositional phrase and an adverbial or adjectival phrase?
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE (SAE) 2
What are the functions of nouns which the noun phrase can also
perform?
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE (SAE) 3
What do the following elements of the nominal and verbal groups stand for: m h q; x h
4.0 CONCLUSION
This unit introduced you to the structure and types of groups in English. It was clearly explained that the types and structure of the English groups consist of the nominal group, the verbal group, the adverbial and the adjectival groups as well as their functions.
5.0 SUMMARY
The following points have been made in this unit
Groups are also referred to as phrases.
A group or phrase refers to a set of more than one word which can function as a part of speech or word class.
Phrases are called by the classes of words to which they belong.
They are also called by the word class to which the most important word in the phrase belongs.
Adjectival, Adverbial and Noun Phrases perform the functions of adjectives, adverbs and noun respectively.
Most adjectival and adverbial phrases are prepositional phrases.
Groups also have structures: the nominal group usually has the following elements: m h q; the elements of the verbal group are:
x h; the adjectival and adverbial group has the elements
intensifier + head.
The elements in each case can come before or after the head and sometimes both before and after.
When many adjectives occur in a row, they all come before the
head.
6.0 TUTOR MARKED ASSIGNMENT (TMA)
Discuss and illustrate both the functions and the structure of the nominal group in English.
7.0 REFERENCES / FURTHER READINGS
Eka, D. (1996) Elements of Grammar and Mechanics of English. Uyo: Samuf Educational.
Quirk, R. and Greenbaum, S. (1980). A University Grammar of English, Longman, London.
Semmelmeyer, M. and Bolander, D. (1984) Instant English Handbook. Illinois: Career Publishing Inc.
Udofot, I. and Ekpenyong, B. 2004. A Comprehensive English Course for Schools and Colleges. Lagos: Quantum Co. Ltd.
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