Functional Analysis of Prepositions of Time and Place in Selected Essays of Senior Secondary School Students in Yola Adamawa State.

This paper titled Functional Analysis of Prepositions of Time and Place in Selected Essays of Senior Secondary Students in Yola Adamawa State, sets to highlight the extent to which the students’ choices of prepositions of time and place reflect in transitivity system in their essays, affect their ability to express the experiential meanings they set out to convey. It specifically sets out to analyze the structure of transitivity system in independent clauses equivalent to simple sentences and clause complexes in order to show that prepositions can be used in context and not whether they are right or wrong as some students argue. Both the library and survey researches were used to get the facts needed for the data collected. The theoretical framework adopted for the study is Systemic Functional Grammar. The elicitation instrument was the students’ essay writing exercise which was given directly and indirectly by the researcher to all the students in SS1 and SS3 classes. The Hallidayian and Mathhessian model of analytical technique procedure was used. This is to differentiate between the part of the main clause that contains elements of processes, participants and circumstances. The data collected were analyzed using frequency counts. The findings indicated that, the students used the Material processes more than the Mental, Relational, Verbal, Existential processes .Based on the findings of the study, the conclusion is that, there is no error, that is, wrong use of prepositions of time (in, on and at) and prepositions of places (in ,on, at) in clauses and sentences because the choice of these prepositions of time depends on the way the speaker perceives the time he/she wants to talk about, whether the person sees it as a “point of time” or “ a period of time”. Prepositions of place (in, on, at) are also used depending on the way the place is perceived by the speaker/writer. It is speakers that make a choice in a range of relevant choices available to them in using language in the kinds of meanings that they might want to express or the functions they might want the word to perform in a language. Some recommendations were suggested which aimed at helping to improve the learning of English in a second language situation.