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| The eight parts of
speech in English. |
Parts of Speech
Parts of speech are types of word in grammar. There are
many different word categories: they are called 'lexical
categories'. The most common are these: |
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Part of Speech
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Function
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Example Words
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Example Sentence(s)
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Notes
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Verb
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Identifies an action or state.
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(to) be, have, do, like, work,
sing, can, must
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London is a
big city. I like London.
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A verb has a subject, which is
a noun performing the action. Some verbs also have
an object, which receives the action.
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Noun
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Identifies a person, place or
thing.
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pen, dog, work, music, town,
London, teacher, John
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New York
City is very beautiful.
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Proper nouns are a type of noun
that refers to something individual. Two proper
nouns are New York City
and the name Amelia. Proper nouns are capitalized.
Other nouns are called common nouns.
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Adjective
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Describes a noun.
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a/an, the, 2 (two), some, good,
big, red, interesting
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The cat is black and white.
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A/an, the, some, many are known
as determiners.
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Adverb
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Describes a verb, adjective or
adverb.
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quickly, silently, well, badly,
very, really
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The giraffe eats slowly, but
when he is very hungry, he eats really quickly.
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Slowly describes the verb eat,
very describes the adjective hungry and really
describes the adverb quickly.
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Pronoun
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Replaces a noun.
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I, you, he, she, some, it
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She is very good at playing the
piano.
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Preposition
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Links a noun to another word.
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to, at, after, on, under
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The dog is under the table.
The man ran over the bridge.
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Under links the noun dog to the
noun table.
Over links the verb ran to the noun bridge.
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Conjunction
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Joins clauses, sentences or
words.
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and, but, when, or
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I like
apples and oranges, but I don't like grapes.
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Interjection
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Short exclamation.
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oh!, ouch!, hi!
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Ouch! That really hurt!
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Verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and interjections are
called open classes because they are parts of speech
that can easily add new words. On the other hand,
pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions are closed
classes because new words cannot be added easily. |
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For example, since pronouns are a closed class, there
are fairly few pronouns: I, me, my, mine, myself, you,
your, yours, yourself, he, him, his, his, himself, she,
her, her, hers, herself, it, it, its, its, itself, we,
us, our, ours, ourselves, they, them, their, theirs,
themselves. Since pronouns are used to replace whole
noun phrases, there is no need to have many kinds of
pronouns. Instead of saying "The Earl of Sandwich
introduced the Earl of Sandwich's favorite food, the
sandwich", one uses the pronoun "his" to replace "the
Earl of Sandwich's" to make the sentence not repeat
itself when it doesn't have to, thus the sentence
becomes "The Earl of Sandwich introduced his favorite
food, the sandwich". New nouns, on the other hand, can
easily be made, and are constantly being added into the
English language. |
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