You may have heard the following words such as nouns, adjectives and verbs. But did you know that they belong to the same family of words called parts of speech? This post will explain more about this phenomenon and also what exactly they are so that you can improve your English. This post will be all about the parts of speech.
You may be asking, what are parts of speech? This is a term that refers to all the possible words in the English language that are split into different possible word groups. In total, there are 9 parts of speech in the English language. These are as follows:
- Noun
- Pronoun
- Verb
- Adverb
- Adjective
- Preposition
- Conjugation
- Determiner
- Interjection
This blog post will explain what these 9-word groups or parts of speech are.
Nouns:
Quite a popular definition of this word is that it “describes a person, place or thing”. However, in addition to this nouns can also be used to express more meanings such as concepts, communities and events (for example).
There are many types of nouns such as countable and un-countable nouns.
Pronouns:
Pronouns are parts of speech primarily used to lessen or prevent duplication of known information. This is a sort of substitution (even if in the English language grammar it isn’t considered this). I will give an example sentence below:
The old man was watering his crops, he then returned home and helped his wife cook dinner.
If pronouns didn’t exist the above sentence would look like the following:
The old man was watering the old man’s crops, the old man then returned home and helped the old man’s wife cook dinner.
As you can see, the pronouns enable the writer of English to have a better and more natural flow of the language, with a lot less repetition.
Verbs:
Verbs are well known to be doing words such as to go or to shop. However, they can also express other meanings such as actions i.e. to wave or hit and also thought processes i.e. to believe and to enjoy.
Like with nouns, there are many types of verbs such as modal verbs, main verbs and auxiliary verbs.
Adverbs:
Adverbs describe a large group of quite different words and shouldn’t be all classified as the same type of word. For example, there are adverbs of frequency such as often and sometimes. There are also adverbs of quantity such as a lot or a little.
However, these in general modify a verb, adjective or another adverb.
Example:
Always move carefully so as not to disturb the others.
In the above sentence, the verb carefully has modified the verb move.
Adjectives:
The most common definition of this word type is that it is a describing word because in fact it describes other words such as nouns and gives us more information about that particular noun.
Adjectives also provide the substance to the description allowing the reader to understand the sentences in a fresh and different way.
For example:
The mice ate the cheese.
The hungry mice ate the 100-day matured cheese
Here, can you see the difference? In the first example, it was plain but in the second I added in two adjectives (in bold typeface) allowing us to get more of an idea of what was happening in this situation.
Preposition
These words tell you where something is about something else. Actually, there are many prepositions in the English language and many of the most common words can be used as prepositions.
For example, they can be really short words such as in, at and on. Some words can act as prepositions too such as in the event of, despite and except.
An example of how prepositions can function is by indicating place and time having a concrete meaning.
For example:
Place: between the door, there is a cat with a hat on its head
Time: we will be meeting at 6 pm on Thursday next week
Conjugation
This looks like a complicated and scary-looking word but all it means is it is a connecting word that connects different parts of a sentence or different clauses. For example, the most well-known conjugations are words such as and, but and if.
Overall they are an important word type that
Here’s a couple of example sentences:
He went there and bought a golf club
He decided to travel to Hong Kong but he thought it was quite far away
Determiner
These are types of words that appear before nouns, they clarify the context of the noun telling us whether information is new or not and the quantity of it.
Examples of determiners are:
He bought four gold boxes
He saw several versions of the same painting
Interjection
These are commonly part of everyday speech or can be used to express feelings or to demand something. Although some interjections such as “indeed” and other similar words can be used in writing generally in formal writing it is better to avoid using them.
Examples:
Wow! The sky is so blue today
How come? Hmm, my exam results are very bad indeed
Conclusion
In summary, I think that the English language can be quite complex. However, it can be broken down into different parts of speech. This means that these 9 parts in tandem with each other can be used to produce very fluent and accurate English. What are your thoughts? Feel free to leave me a comment below.
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