Let's talk about parts of speech, and I
thought we could introduce all the eight
parts of speech just by having a look at
a couple of sample sentences here. So we have
two sentences kind of joined together,
and we'll start here by looking at the
nouns. So the nouns are the first part
of speech. And a noun is a person, place,
thing, or idea. So you can see here that
we have three nouns: we have "cat" and we
have "pizza" and we have "pop." The second
part of speech, and we're doing this very
quickly here, is the verb. So a verb is
commonly an action word, but we can have
other verbs as well, so we can have
linking verbs and helping verbs and so
on.
We have two verbs here: we have "said" and
we have "love." And if we have a main
verb in a sentence, then we also need a
subject doing the verb. So we're getting
ahead of ourselves a little bit here, but
you can see that "cat" is the subject ("[t]he
cat said") and we have "I," [which] is a subject as well.
So we'll just undo this here for a
moment,
but you can sort of see what's coming
up in this regard. The third
part of speech that we can talk about is
the pronoun, so 3 is the pronoun. And a
pronoun stands in the place of a
noun.
So if you were to look at "I," [in] "I really
love cold pizza and pop," "I" refers back to
a noun here.
So "cat" is the noun, and "I" stands in
the place of "cat;" it replaces it. "[M]e" is
also a pronoun, and, in this case the word
that replaces "me" is not in the sentence,
so that can happen too. And this would be
a reference to my name, let's say, which
in this case is Conrad; there you go, now
you know my name. And Conrad would be the
noun ... it's a proper noun, and "me" is the
pronoun that replaces it. Okay, to introduce
this pronoun we've used a preposition,
and a preposition relates
a noun or pronoun to the rest of the
sentence. So the preposition is "to" and
it relates "me," the object of the
preposition, to the rest of the sentence,
and that's why we often call preposition
a structure word. Another part of speech
that we can use is an adjective,
so 5 is an adjective. And an adjective is
a word that modifies another word,
so we call this a modifier. And what
adjectives modify is nouns.
So in this case we have "cold," and the
word "cold" modifies "pizza." Now you can
also see that there's this other little
word at the beginning here, "the," which
also seems to modify a noun. So "cat" is
the noun, and we say "[t]he cat." But the word
"the" is a little bit tricky. So this is
referred to as an article; there are just
a few of these: we have "a," "an," and "the." And
these articles are usually classified as
adjectives, so we'll just include them in this
category. Another term for them that
you'll sometimes see is a determiner. And
a determiner is a larger category
(we're not going to talk about that
too much at this point), but a determiner is
sometimes classified as a different part
of speech, as a ninth part-of-speech. So
just be aware of that. We will just stick
to our eight parts of speech, but you may
come across this term at some point.
Now our sixth part of speech is the adverb,
and an adverb is a tricky word. It's also
a modifier, but this modifier doesn't
just modify one thing, it modifies lots
of different things. Often it modifies
the verb, and you can see that here with
"really," so "really" is our adverb and it's
telling you something about the loving.
How much do I love? I really love.
So it's changing the meaning of
"love." But adverbs can do much more than
just modify verbs. They can modify
verbals and other adjectives and other adverbs
and so on. So there's a long list of
things that adverbs can modify. In the
seventh place then, we have a conjunction.
And a conjunction is simply a word
that ties parts of the sentence together.
So it can tie together single words or
phrases or clauses. And we have one
conjunction here: "and." And the word "and" is
called a coordinating conjunction (we'll get to
that at some future
point), but it's tying together these two
nouns. So "pizza" and "pop" -- they're
being tied together with our conjunction.
And then our last part of speech is the
interjection. An interjection is a
strong sense of emotion that's being
expressed. And we have one example here:
"yum." So "yum" can't really easily be
classified as a different part of speech.
So an interjection is a word that
typically stands by itself, and these are
words like "ouch" and "sorry" and "no," if
you kind of shout it out,
and "please" and so on. So lots of
interjections; they're not usually used
in formal or academic writing, but it's
good to be aware of this part of speech.
Those are the eight parts of speech.
Again, sometimes people also mention
the determiner. And another one that we'll
talk about is the conjunctive adverb. So
conjunctive adverb -- not really a separate
part of speech, but it's a bit of a
hybrid construction, and so we'll
have a separate section on that as well.
Hopefully seeing the big picture here helps,
and I look forward to talking about the
specific parts of speech in more detail
with you.