ONUEGWUNWOKE, CYNTHIA ADAEZE, PH.D
Department of English Language and Literature,
Alvan Ikoku Federal College of Education, Owerri.
onuegwunwokeadaeze@yahoo.com
Abstract
A sentence is a linguistic unit that consists of grammatically linked words which are grouped meaningfully to express the following; statement, question, command or exclamation. The English sentence patterns are; simple, complex, compound, compound-complex and multiple sentences. This paper made a syntactic analysis of sentence patterns and sentence functions in selected students’ writings to know the degree students’ display their knowledge of the various sentence patterns and sentence functions in writing. The theoretical framework used for analysis was the prescriptive grammar model. The research was a qualitative one. Therefore, a frequency count of the sentence patterns and sentence functions used by the students in their writings was made and the statistical tool used for calculation was the simple percentage method. The total population for the study was one hundred first year students from the department of English and Literature in Alvan Ikoku Federal College of Education, Owerri. The research came out with the following results under sentence pattern used by the students: simple sentence 36%, compound sentence 20%, complex sentence 19%, compound-complex sentence 15%, multiple sentence 10%. And then for sentence function, 40% of the students used declarative sentence, 22% used interrogative, 20% used imperative, 18% used exclamatory. From the above result, there is monotony in the researched students’ writing. Therefore, the researcher suggests that second language learners should explore and also, know that there is plenty of room between the two extremes for them to experiment with words and sentences for better performance generally.
Full Text:A SYNTACTIC ANALYSIS OF SENTENTIAL PATTERNS AND SENTENTIAL FUNCTIONS IN SELECTED STUDENTS