Parts of Speech

Mastering language can be a very technical process. Never mind the artistic skill that goes into being a good writer — understanding things like parts of speech, sentence diagramming, and other grammatical terms are paramount for writers who want not only to produce concise text, but who want to be able to communicate effectively with other writers and editors about content.

Parts of speech explain how words are used in context. Each word in the English language can be categorized into one of the eight parts of speech. According to Wikipedia:

In grammar, a lexical category (also word class, lexical class, or in traditional grammar part of speech) is a linguistic category of words (or more precisely lexical items), which is generally defined by the syntactic or morphological behaviour of the lexical item in question.

However, many words fit into more than one category, depending on how the word is used. For example: dance can be used as a noun or as a verb:

Noun: I am going to the dance.

Verb: I dance every day.

Nouns and verbs are the most common parts of speech, but there are several more. Here’s a complete list, including definitions:

Verb: Indicates action (walk), including occurrences (begin), states of being (sit), or relations between things (button activates computer).

Noun: Often taught as person (girl), place (island), or thing (car), a noun is a word that can function as the subject or object of a sentence, either independently or as part of a phrase.

Pronoun: A pronoun is a word used to substitute another word. Common pronouns include you, they, we, he, she, and it.

Adjective: An adjective is a word that modifies a noun or pronoun. Often, adjectives are descriptive as in comfortable or red. Traditionally, adjectives included determiners, words that indicate definiteness as in articles a vs. the, or quantity as in one, some, or many. Linguists are increasingly separating determiners as a unique part of speech.

Adverb: Adverbs are like adjectives in that they are modifiers, but they modify any other type of word or phrase except for nouns. For instance, they modify verbs, adjectives, other adverbs, etc. Examples include quickly, and dark (as in dark red where dark modified the adjective red).

Preposition: A preposition is used to introduce a prepositional phrase. Normally, a preposition is found before a noun or pronoun, and often indicates placement. Common prepositions include to, in, at, over, under, by, since.

Conjunction: A small group of words that form connections between words, phrases, or clauses. The most common are and, or, but, and yet. Others include because and however.

Interjection: According to dictionary.com: any member of a class of words expressing emotion, distinguished in most languages by their use in grammatical isolation, as Hey! Oh! Ouch! Ugh!

Now that you know all the parts of speech, the next step would be to identify them in sentences.

Email this article to a friend

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!