This is the first of a number of videos
in which we'll review all the eight parts
of speech. And as we're doing this, I
thought it might be nice to have a look
at some famous sentences (opening
sentences) from different novels. And in
this video, we'll start with Jane
Austen's Pride and Prejudice. So our
sentence reads, "It is a truth universally
acknowledged, that a single man in
possession of a good fortune, must be in
want of a wife." And one of the things
you'll notice here is that there are
some commas here, and these days we
probably wouldn't put commas here but
we'll just ignore that for now. (Of course
this has more to do with
punctuation anyway than with parts of
speech.) If we were to divide the sentence
into its clauses -- so again we're getting
ahead of ourselves here -- but a clause is
a complete unit that has
a subject and a verb ... then we have two
clauses here--we have one that starts
with "it" and ends with "acknowledged," and a
second one that starts with "that" and
ends with "wife." So in the first
clause then, we have "it" which is a
pronoun. It's also
the subject of this part of the sentence,
so it's our subject as well. And we have
a verb that goes with it: "is" is a linking
verb. And usually what comes after
linking verb is either a noun or
adjective that describes the subject. So
here we have "truth" ... it's a noun, [and] can also
be called the subject complement because
it describes the subject "it." So the
linking verb is usually seen as a kind
of equals sign, so "it" = "truth."
We have a few other words here as
well. We have "a," and "a" is an article. There are
just a few articles: there's "a," "an," and
"the." And articles are usually classified
as an adjective. So if you were to say,
"truth is the noun. What kind of truth?" You
would say, "a truth." And so you can see
that
"a" modifies "truth." We have some other
description here as well, so we have
"universally" and "acknowledged."
"Acknowledged" is an adjective and it's an
adjective that's formed from a past
participle. So if you were to take
the verb "to acknowledge," then that can
become "acknowledged" as the past
participle. And a past participle is a
verbal. There are just a few verbals--there are
past participles, present participles, and
infinitives. And a verbal can act like an
adjective, so here "acknowledged" also
describes "truth." And then the last one
here, "universally," ends in -ly which is a
kind of give away, so this is an adverb.
But you may still be wondering what it
describes. And in this case, "universally"
goes with "acknowledged." So acknowledge to
what extent or to what degree?
Universally acknowledged; to that
degree. And adverbs can modify verbals
and adjectives, so they usually
modify the verb but they can do this
other kind of modification as well.
That's our opening clause. Then we get to
the second part and we start with "that,"
which is a subordinating conjunction.
You might
argue that this is the most important
word in a sentence because it connects
everything that follows to the first
clause. And the second part here then is
a dependent clause and it cannot stand
by itself. So clauses are either
independent or dependent. If they can be
a sentence by themselves, then they're
independent. Then we have "a" (we've had
this one already), so "a" is the article, and
we might as well just underline the
other ones in this sentence (there's four
of them). Then we have "man," "a single man,"
so there's our noun, and this is also our
subject for this clause. Now the verb
comes quite a bit later, so "must be" is
the verb phrase.
And "must," in case you want to know, is
a modal auxiliary, a kind of helping verb.
"Be" is another
linking verb incidentally. Then we have,
going back here, "single." That's an
adjective, and it's modifying "man." So what
kind of man? A single man. And then we
have a whole bunch of prepositional
phrases. So we have "in possession," "of a
good fortune," "in want," and "of a wife," four
prepositional phrases. You can always put
these in brackets because prepositional
phrases are not part of the core of the
sentence--they just add some extra flavour
and extra information. So our
prepositions then are "in," "of," "in," and "of,"
and you can see a nice pattern there
actually. We have "possession"--that's a
noun. We have "fortune"--there's a noun. We
have "want," which is a noun, and "wife," which
is a noun. And again you can see the
pattern here, which is that in each case
the preposition has an object, and the
object is usually a noun or pronoun,
which is then being related to the rest
of the sentence. So that's pretty much it.
We also have "good," of course, which is
another adjective and just gives a
little bit more information about
"fortune." What kind of fortune? A good
fortune. So that's the whole sentence--
it's a bit messy now, but you can see
that, with a little bit of dedication and
time, you can take the whole sentence
apart. And we'll do some other videos as
well with some other famous sentences.