THE VERB PHRASE IN ITS SENTENTIAL ASPECT AND ITS IMPACT ON A SUCCESSFUL THEME-RHEME RELATION: A STUDY OF SOME EXCERPTS FROM GIWA AND KAMAL'S PROSE WRITING

Abstract

Many scholars have dwelt extensively on the concept of verb in English and its complementation (i.e. VP), which is considered as rheme in discourse. Such complementation may constitute a simple or a complex rhemic structure. It is against this notion that this paper studies some descriptive sentences in Giwa's I'd Rather Die and Kamal's Someone Somewhere, explore and analyse the various syntactic properties/ structures used in them and account on how best they constitute the rhemes of their respective themes. The researcher uses purposive sampling technique to select some sentences, which the novelists use to describe some characters in the novels under study. The paper theorises the Brown and Miller's categorisation of verbs and analyses the way they have been manipulated by the novelists in the sampled sentences. The findings have revealed that both the two novels use intransitive, transitive, ditransitive, transitive locative and ditransitive locative at different degrees with similar or different VP structures. Copular verb is only used in Giwa's novel. The paper has also discovered that the two novelists almost use transitive verbs at the same syntactic maturity level. They equally use ditranstive at the same rate, even though Giwa's usage is ditransitive locative. Finally, the paper has also found that intransitive locative is used in the sampled sentences, despite the fact that Brown and Miller do not categorise it. The paper, therefore, recommends that intransitive locative should be recognised as another category of verb since it manifests practically, as contained in some of the sampled sentences analysed. Hence, Brown and Miller's categorisation of verbs should be considered as a guide.