This week on our English blog, we want to talk about the question: What are parts of speech? We can think of parts of speech like different shapes of building blocks (like Legos*) that children play with. We use short blocks, long blocks, wide blocks, narrow blocks, etc. Each part of speech is like a different type of block. Let’s do a short introduction to the different parts of speech in the English language.
People, places, things and ideas are called nouns.
Let’s look at an example. How many nouns are in this sentence?
The quick, red fox jumped over the lazy, brown dog.
Remember, we are looking for people, places, things or ideas. This sentence has many words, but it only has two nouns. Let’s underline them.
The quick, red fox jumped over the lazy, brown dog.
Fox is the subject. Dog is the object. They are both nouns.
Let’s try another one.
John and his loud cockatoo** live in New York, where they go for a walk in Central Park every day, and then they eat pizza while they both have daydreams about sailing around the world on a yacht.
Ok. Now we really have a lot of words, and we have more than two nouns. Let’s underline them.
John and his loud cockatoo live in New York, where they go for a walk in Central Park every day, and then they eat pizza while they both have daydreams about sailing around the world on a yacht.
Some of these nouns look a little different from the others. This is because they are proper nouns. Proper nouns are CAPITALIZED. Proper nouns are usually the names of specific people or places. In this sentence, we have John, New York and Central Park. The other nouns are called common nouns. Sometimes, though not always, you can recognize nouns because they may have an article (a, an, the) before them.
Let’s do an easy one now. Some words replace nouns. These words are called pronouns.
Let’s look again at the first example:
The quick, red fox jumped over the lazy, brown dog.
How many pronouns can you find?
The quick, red fox jumped over the lazy, brown dog.
That’s right! Zero! We only have nouns here.
How about the second example? We have:
John and his loud cockatoo live in New York, where they go for a walk in Central Park every day, and then they eat pizza while they both have daydreams about sailing around the world on a yacht.
We have the same pronoun repeated three times: they. Each time, this word replaces the nouns “John” and “cockatoo”. Let’s look at one more.
Lauren likes Humphrey.
This sentence has two nouns. We can change the sentence:
She likes him. This sentence has two pronouns.
Let’s look at another part of speech: verbs. Verbs are action words.
The quick, red fox jumped over the lazy, brown dog.
Can you find the action word?
The quick, red fox jumped over the lazy, brown dog.
Yep, jumped.
Let’s look again at the second example. How many verbs can you find?
John and his loud cockatoo live in New York, where they go for a walk in Central Park every day, and then they eat pizza while they both have daydreams about sailing around the world on a yacht.
All the verbs in this example only have one word, but many times a verb will consist of more than one word.
Ok. Now let’s look at describing words, adjectives. Adjectives give us information about nouns. Let’s go back to the fox and the dog. What information do we have about the fox and the dog?
The quick, red fox jumped over the lazy, brown dog.
How many adjectives do we have?
The quick, red fox jumped over the lazy, brown dog.
Four! Two adjectives for each noun.
Let’s have a look at a new example and another part of speech, adverbs.
While I was sleeping soundly, I had a very scary dream about a monster that was chasing me extremely quickly.
Adjectives modify nouns. Adverbs modify adjectives, verbs and other adverbs. How many adverbs do you think are in the example?
While I was sleeping soundly, I had a very scary dream about a monster that was chasing me extremely quickly.
“Soundly” answers the question: how was I sleeping?
sleep=verb
“Very” answers the question: how scary?
scary=adjective
“Quickly” answers the question: how was the monster chasing me.
chase=verb
“Extremely” answers the question: how quicky?
quickly=adverb
Next, we should look at a very horrible part of speech: prepositions. Prepositions often give us information about time, place and movement. Many times, prepositions involve connections between words.
The quick, red fox jumped over the lazy, brown dog.
Here, our preposition is “over”. This preposition is related to the verb “jump” and the noun “dog”.
How about John and his cockatoo?
John and his loud cockatoo live in New York, where they go for a walk in Central Park every day, and then they eat pizza while they both have daydreams about sailing around the world on a yacht.
Notice that all of the prepositions in this example have objects.
Let’s look at two final parts of speech. One of them is conjunctions. Conjunctions connect words, phrases and clauses. There is a famous educational video about conjunctions.***
John and his loud cockatoo live in New York, where they go for a walk in Central Park every day, and then they eat pizza while they both have daydreams about sailing around the world on a yacht.
Here we have the conjunctions “and” and “while”. In this example, they both connect clauses. We will talk more about clauses in a later post.
Our last part of speech is interjections. Interjections are different because they are usually exclamations that don’t really connect to the other parts of speech. Interjections usually communicate emotions.
Ugh! Wow! Hey! Oh!
This has been a basic introduction to parts of speech. The more you read, the more you will begin to notice the parts of speech and identify them more easily. We will review parts of speech in an upcoming post.
Keep reading in English every day!
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego