It’s time for another grammar quiz on our English blog! This time we are going to review the information in our earlier post about English parts of speech. Here are the parts of speech that we discussed in that post: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, pronoun, conjunction and interjection.
Let’s have a look at a few examples to refresh our memories about some of these. Then we can examine a longer passage to help us get a clear view of a more complex text.
Here we go!
Let’s begin with a basic review and find the nouns in this example:
Heather likes San Francisco because it has many amazing things to see, including a crazy orange bridge, a huge park, an island with an old prison and a famous skyscraper that looks like a pyramid!
Nouns=
people places things ideas
3
2
1
Heather likes San Francisco because it has many amazing things to see, including a crazy orange bridge, a huge park, an island with an old prison and a famous skyscraper that looks like a pyramid!
Ok. No problem, right? Why is this important? Identifying nouns can help you find the subjects and objects of sentences and clauses. What are clauses? The short answer is: a clause is a group of words with a subject and a verb. We are going to explore clauses in some future posts. Finding the nouns in a sentence is also useful because it allows us to think about what some of the other words are and what their functions might be.
Let’s identify some of the things that are giving us information about these nouns. First, we have some CAPITALIZATION, in ‘Heather’ and ‘San Francisco’. As we saw in our previous post, capitalization helps us identify proper nouns, which are nouns that represent specific people, places and things. We also have words that give us information about nouns. What are those called? Yep, adjectives. Try to find the adjectives in the example before you scroll down:
Heather likes San Francisco because it has many amazing things to see, including a crazy orange bridge, a huge park, an island with an old prison and a famous skyscraper that looks like a pyramid!
3
2
1
Heather likes San Francisco because it has many amazing things to see, including a crazy orange bridge, a huge park, an island with an old prison and a famous skyscraper that looks like a pyramid!
Ok. Now we have our adjectives. How about our verbs? Let’s find the ‘action words’!
Heather likes San Francisco because it has many amazing things to see, including a crazy orange bridge, a huge park, an island with an old prison and a famous skyscraper that looks like a pyramid!
3
2
1
Heather likes San Francisco because it has many amazing things to see, including a crazy orange bridge, a huge park, an island with an old prison, and a famous skyscraper that looks like a pyramid!
It is important to note that the verbs we find may look very different from each other:
likes
present tense (regular verb)
has
present tense (irregular verb)
to see
infinitive
including
participle
looks like
phrasal verb (a verb whose base form has more than one word)
Ok. Now we have our bearings* a little. Let’s look again, this time for the conjunctions, which join words, phrases or clauses together. These are so important because they help us identify the main ideas in a text and understand how those ideas are connected:
Heather likes San Francisco because it has many amazing things to see, including a crazy orange bridge, a huge park, an island with an old prison and a famous skyscraper that looks like a pyramid!
3
2
1
Heather likes San Francisco because it has many amazing things to see, including a crazy orange bridge, a huge park, an island with an old prison and a famous skyscraper that looks like a pyramid!
In this example, ‘because’ connects the main clause:
‘Heather likes San Francisco’
With a subordinate clause that contains information about the reason for something.
We also have the conjunction ‘and’, which connects nouns.
Let’s look at another part of speech. How many pronouns do we have in this example?
Heather likes San Francisco because it has many amazing things to see, including a crazy orange bridge, a huge park, an island with an old prison and a famous skyscraper that looks like a pyramid!
That’s right, just one: it. This is because we only refer to one noun in this example after we mention it; the noun that we refer to is ‘San Francisco’.
The last part of speech from our list that we have in the example is the preposition ‘with’. Our example does not contain an adverb or an interjection. You may be wondering about the other words, ‘many, a, an’. Some sources consider ‘many’ to be an adjective, but most people who study English grammar think of it as a quantifier**. As for ‘a’ and ‘an’, they are articles, which are often not included in the parts of speech.
Let’s try a few more short examples before we look at a longer one. Make some notes about the parts of speech in each example.
1 The red fox ran quickly in the forest.
2 The man bought two very expensive fish yesterday.
3 The woman softly whispered the mysterious secret into the man’s ear.
4 She smiled hopefully as the teacher returned the difficult quiz from Tuesday.
5 Wow!
3
2
1
Answers
1 The red fox ran quickly in the forest because he was looking for something to eat.
2 The man bought two very expensive fish yesterday.
3 The woman softly whispered the mysterious secret into the man’s ear.
4 She smiled hopefully as the teacher returned the difficult quiz from Tuesday.
5 Wow!
KEY: The parts of speech are colored here to match the answers above.
adjective
adverb
noun
verb
preposition
pronoun
conjunction
interjection
Finally, let’s try a more advanced example for fun. Here is the first paragraph of Ernest Hemingway’s book, The Old Man and the Sea. In this example, we are not going to try to identify all the parts of speech. We are just going to choose two: verbs and conjunctions. This will help us focus on the main ideas that are presented here and how they are connected:
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.
3
2
1
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four
days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.
Bold= Verbs
Italics= Conjunctions
This example gives us an idea about how many action words are in a more complex text and helps us understand how the language is connected. When we explore clauses in an upcoming post, we will learn more about how to view complex texts in clear ways. We hope that this review has emphasized how important it is to be able to identify parts of speech in English.
Keep reading in English to become more comfortable with identifying parts of speech and use the comments section below if you have questions about the information in this post!
*
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/learner-english/bearings
**
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/learner-english/quantifier