Yesterday's class was interesting.
She came yesterday.
Yesterday is classed as a morphemic noun in all three sentences because the word is able to take inflections marking plural, possessive, or both—characteristic of nouns. Syntactically, however, yesterday is not the same. In sentence one, yesterday is a syntactic noun. In sentence two, it is classed as a syntactic adjective. In sentence three, the word yesterday tells when and is, therefore, considered a syntactic adverb. The difference, then, according to structural linguists, is between a word's form and its function in a sentence.Yesterday was Monday.
Yesterday's class was interesting.
She came yesterday.
Yesterday is classed as a morphemic noun in all three
sentences because the word is able to take inflections marking plural, possessive, or both—characteristic of nouns. Syntactically, however, yesterday is not the same. In sentence one, yesterday is a syntactic noun. In sentence two, it is classed as a syntactic adjective. In sentence three, the word yesterday tells when and is, therefore, considered a syntactic adverb. The difference, then, according to structural linguists, is between a word's form and its function in a sentence.Yesterday was Monday.
Yesterday's class was interesting.
She came yesterday.
Yesterday is classed as a morphemic noun in all three sentences because the word is able to take inflections marking plural, possessive, or both—characteristic of nouns. Syntactically, however, yesterday is not the same. In sentence one, yesterday is a syntactic noun. In sentence two, it is classed as a syntactic adjective. In sentence three, the word yesterday tells when and is, therefore, considered a syntactic adverb. The difference, then, according to structural linguists, is between a word's form and its function in a sentence.