ADEJARE, ROSELINE ABONEGO

Lang, Arts AND Sci

At the Lang, Arts AND Sci department office

Appointment on Visitation important

Topic: Grammatical Description

Description: My research interest is primarily the description of English grammar and secondarily its teaching. My first degree programme which married the full English language courses with those of Education facilitates my being a descriptive linguist and a pedagogic linguist, a linguist training would-be language teachers. Because English linguistics is vast I specialise in English grammar, with a special focus on the English verbal group, while covering multi-disciplinary applied linguistics. My interest in descriptive English grammar is premised on the realisation that no one can effectively teach another how to teach a language they do not know. I have thus contributed to the description of English grammar and the English verbal group as well as English language teaching and the related issue of language use in education.

#	Certificate	School	Year
1.	Ph.D (English Language ( English Grammar: The English Verbal Group))	University of Lagos, Akoka, Lagos, Department of English	2010

Revisiting the Description of Tense in English

 

The controversy surrounding the description of tense in English has remained because scholars have concentrated on carving descriptive niches for themselves rather than paying appropriate attention to its causative factor(s), resulting in three different descriptions: traditional, structural and systemic. This paper identifies the genesis of the problems, points out how this hinders the attainment of descriptive accuracy, and proffers some solutions. It contends that arguments, such as whether or not there is a future tense for English, stem from the way tense is generally conceptualised. It examined ten standard definitions of tense and found that the keyword grammaticalisation is narrowly interpreted to mean the morphological only, whereas a language’s grammatical system consists of both syntactical and morphological aspects. The non-recognition of the syntactical component--- even by grammarians that acknowledge future tense--- is the root of the descriptive issues with tense. The paper proposes syntactical marking, achieved by placing the auxiliary WILL/SHALL or BE GOING TO before the base form verb, as the mechanism for future tense marking in English. In effect, English has a three-tense system and its modes of marking are morphological (for present and past tenses) and syntactical (for future tense). 

ADEJARE, ROSELINE is a Associate Professor / Reader at the Department of Lang, Arts AND Sci

ADEJARE, has a Ph.D in English Language ( English Grammar: The English Verbal Group) from University of Lagos, Akoka, Lagos, Department of English