Parts of Speech

Parts of Speech: We use thousands of words every day and would you believe if I tell you that every single one of them can be categorized into 8 categories that we call Parts of speech. These 8 parts of speech literally encompass each and every word you use in your English. How amazing is that! In this chapter, we will cover all of the 8 parts of speech with loads of fun example. In essence, everything else in grammar is based on Parts of speech, so we really recommend you to use this as your holy grail and get it absolutely soaked in.

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Parts of Speech: The eight pillars of english grammar:

Let us start by enlisting the 8 parts of speech first: Noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, adjective, conjunction, preposition and interjection. Now let’s look at each one of these one by one:

Noun:

Simply put: Nouns are names of people, things, places or ideas. They are simply the names you use to refer to a thing, person, place or idea. Nouns could be proper nouns or common nouns or abstract nouns or collective nouns or possessive nouns or compound nouns.

1. Common nouns: Just generic names, starting with a small letter. Examples – bees, yard, cycle, pasta.
2. Proper nouns: Specific names, starting with capital letter always. Examples – Geeta, Shashank, Joe’s pasta, Harry Potter, Nancy Drew
3. Abstract nouns: Usually names of ideas or emotions. Examples – Happiness, joy, excitement
4. Collective nouns: These are nouns that are used to count something in a union or a group. Examples – team, jury, school, clan, class, pride
5. Possessive nouns: Sometimes you want to show the possession of something with the noun. That’s when you add an apostrophe s to the noun and it becomes a possessive noun. Examples – Sheela’s, Juno’s pizza
6. Compound nouns: As simple as it sounds, when two nouns come together they form a compound noun. Examples – daughter-in-law, tooth-paste, eight-pack

Pronoun:

A pronoun is a word used instead of the noun. The meaning stays the same, it’s just instead of repeatedly using the noun, you have something shorter that is the pronoun. To list a few- I, her, she, them, theirs, they, and so on.

A few examples:

1. Sheela is a great singer. She is performing at the city centre mall today.
2. My parents are in town. They will visit me day after tomorrow.
3. Joe’s pizza is a great place to eat at. It’s right around the corner.

Verb:

All the fun of the sentence is the verb. Verb is the action in a sentence. It could be a physical or mental action or just the state of being in a sentence. Let’s see a quick few examples:

1. The Sun rises from the East.
2. Children are playing on the playground.
3. My cat jumps on me when I’m sleeping.
4. She was with the choir group last summer.

Notice how the verbs am, is, are, was, were show the state of being.

Adverb:

An adverb aids the verb in showing how the action was done. Adverbs describe the verbs in the sentence. There are different kinds of Adverbs that we have covered before:

1. Adverbs of time: These show the time of the action. They answer the question of when?  Example – She walked in today.
2. Adverbs of manner: These adverbs show the manner of action. they usually are the common adverb type. They answer the question of how? Example – The turtle walked slowly. 
3. Adverbs of place: This kind of adverbs show the place of the action, essentially answering the question of where? Example – We looked for mushrooms everywhere in the marshy land.
4. Adverbs of degree: This kind shows the degree of the verb, essentially answering the question of how much? Example – This escalated very quickly.

Adjective:

This part of speech adds what we can call color to the sentence. An adjective describes the noun or a pronoun. It could be a quality or shape or size or number. let’s understand this with the help of a few examples:

1. My grandfather has a beautiful house in San Francisco.
2. She is a clever girl.
3. My house is situated in a quaint place in the village.

Preposition:

Prepositions are simply words that connect different elements in a sentence to define a relation between them. Some prepositions are- with, to, from, on, in, beneath, between and so on.

1. The cat is sitting on the table.
2. Please put a layer of caramel inside my roll.

Conjunction:

Conjunction are words that join two clauses, phrases or words in a single sentence. Let’s see a few examples:

1. This meditation technique is very clam and healing.
2. I wanted to backpack across Europe, but I have to wait until March end till the weather gets better.
3. We are going to Puerto Rico next year because of my brother’s wedding there.

Interjection:

Interjections are usually words that express strong emotions usually followed by an exclamation mark. For example:

1. Hurray! We will be seeing the space very soon.
2. Ouch! That sting ray really hurt!
3. Bravo! Well done!

Now that we hope you have some idea of the different parts of speech, you know what would be great? If you could just pick up a few sentences, sit with your teacher and identify all these parts of speech one by one in a few sample sentences. Learning is always by doing, remember this. Only when you do it for yourself will you truly learn anything. Trust yourself and go for it. You are on your way to becoming a grammar guru. Have fun!