I thought it might be useful to do an overview of the eight different parts of speech in the
English language, and I think this is important because, first of all, when you're studying parts
of speech it's often easy to kind of lose track of the big picture, and also if you want to move
on to something like sentence structure then it's great to have a quick review, a kind of refresher,
or, if you're really brave you can jump in at the deep end of the pool, start with this and
then right away move on to sentence structure. Now I can't deal with every last aspect of parts
of speech but we're going to try to do our best to cover the highlights. Let's start with nouns here,
and we can make a distinction between two types of nouns. So we have what's called a proper noun,
as opposed to a common noun. So "steak" here would be a common noun, and a common noun is just
any generic person, place, thing, or idea, whereas a proper noun is a specific one.
There's one individual here named Bob whereas "steak" can stand for any steak,
basically. Common nouns are not capitalized unless they start the sentence, whereas proper ones are.
Again, I want to emphasize that a noun can also be an idea, can be fairly abstract, and as we will
see, sometimes parts of speech can take on other functions. So a noun can even act a bit like an
adjective, and a verbal can act like a noun, and so on and so forth. But we'll see some examples of
this, so not to worry about it at this stage. There are some other nouns here as well, so,
for instance, "vegetarian" here is a noun. In the second sentence, "temperatures," "tomato plants,"
"plan," and so on and so forth. So lots of nouns here, and they're kind of the building blocks of
language. The next part of speech is the pronoun. A pronoun stands in the place of a noun. So,
for instance, here we have "he." Okay, that's a pronoun, and a pronoun typically refers back
to a noun. In this case, it refers back to Bob and the word for this noun that comes
before this is called the "antecedent." There we go: the noun that comes before the pronoun.
It's not always easy to find the antecedents though. Sometimes it seems to be missing,
especially with the word "it." But for the most part we can try to kind of figure out
what the pronoun stands in the place of. So we've done two parts of speech: nouns and pronouns.
It's going to get more complicated here now because we're going to move on to verbs. When
it comes to verbs there are a bunch of different types that are important to recognize. If we look
here for instance, where it says "he will make" we've got a couple of verbs working together.
"Will" here's what we call a helping verb. These helping verbs they work with the main verb in the
verb clause to make this larger unit. In this case "make" here is really the the main verb and "will"
is helping out. Now "make" here is what we call a transitive verb -- as opposed to an intransitive
verb. So an intransitive verb does not have a direct object, whereas a transitive verb does
have a direct object. If we say, "we'll make what?" then we say "an exception." "Exception"
by the way is also a noun in case you're curious -- we kind of skipped that one before.
So in this case we can call "make" a transitive verb if we say something like "Bob laughs."
Then "laughs" is intransitive, so this would be intransitive because it does not have a direct
object. In some cases we can have verbs that can be transitive or intransitive depending on
the context, depending on what they're doing in the sentence, if they take an
object or not. By the way, these words like "object" and "subject" and so on -- they are not
parts of speech but there are other ways to think about the function of the words in the sentence.
Now we have two kinds of verbs then (transitive and intransitive), but there's a subcategory of
intransitive verbs and these are called linking verbs. In fact, we have one here. This is a linking
verb, and the idea with a linking verb is that it ties together the subject to something that
describes it. The thing that comes after the linking verb is normally a noun or an adjective.
In this case the word is "vegetarian." "Vegetarian" describes Bob. "Vegetarian," as we saw, is a noun.
There we go: it's a noun. And so that's the construction here,
but we could also just use an adjective. We could say, "Bob is happy," and then "happy" describes Bob.
So linking verbs are a fairly small category, but they are kind of important because they function
slightly differently. Most of the linking verbs are going to be forms of "to be" or "become,"
but they're also a bunch that are related to the senses, to smell, and to taste, and so on.
Okay, that gives us some information about verbs. Now I want to talk about a
subcategory of verbs that we call verbals. Let's just scroll down a bit here. So
verbals ... oops, I guess we got the wrong colour here, if it matters to you ... so verbals:
these are words that are derived from verbs and they will never be the main verb of the sentence
unless they have a helping verb with them. Okay, so we have three types of verbals. We have
present participles, first of all. Present participles -- there we go. And these always
end in "-ing," like "smoking" and "taking" and "loving," and so on. Then we have past participles.
These are a little bit harder to spot. Most of the time they end in "-ed," as in "kicked," "laughed," and so on.
But sometimes with irregular verbs they are a little bit different. "[Take] for instance "seen." If we say
"I see," "I saw," "I have seen," then we get the past participle "seen." Then we also have infinitives
and these are easier to recognize again because they're always "to" plus the verb.
In fact you can see one right here -- we have "to swim." That's an infinitive.
If we look further up we also have a present participle here (freezing) and in this case the
present participle is acting like an adjective. When we describe a noun then we use an adjective,
so what kind of temperatures? The freezing temperatures. What you can see then is
that these verbals are quite good at taking on different roles in the sentence
so they can act as part of the verb phrase, but they can also
be adjectives, or even kind of by themselves to create smaller phrases. There are lots of
things that they can do, and it's really good to be aware of their different functions.
That's it for verbals for now. Let's move on to adjectives.
As we said, "freezing" is an adjective and it's fairly easy to add adjectives because we just
find a noun (sorry, I lost the screen here). We just find a noun and we try to describe it. For instance,
"vegetarian" is a noun and if we say "what kind of vegetarian?" we can say "a fervent vegetarian"!
Anytime you have a word that describes a noun like that -- that modifies it -- we're dealing with an
adjective. There's a subset of adjectives that are called articles. Okay, so articles. This is one way
to classify these words. These are all also called determiners sometimes, but these are words
(there are just three of them) ... they are "the," "a," and "an." And the last two are just variations
of the same word. So because they tend to come before the noun, they go with the noun. We
tend to classify them as adjectives, or we can simply call them articles. So we've dealt with
four parts of speech now: nouns, pronouns, verbs, and adjectives.
Let's move on to adverbs. And this, I think, is in many ways the hardest part of speech.
I will scroll down a bit here, and we'll sort of do this on its own slide. Adverbs typically
... end in "-ly," but not necessarily.
Some adjectives can also end in "-ly," for instance. If we say "she was lonely" ...
So this is a clue, but it doesn't necessarily indicate that we're dealing with an adverb.
Adverbs tend to do one of five things. Most of the time they're going to
describe the verb. So they describe the verb. For instance, we might say "Bob
often laughs,"
and in this case if we ask the question "how or when does he laugh?" then we answer it with "often."
So, "often" is the adverb. It gives us some more information about the verb. By the way, some
instructors like to focus on the questions that you should ask to find the adverb,
like "how?" and "when?" and "how much?" and so on. That is useful, but I think it's better to
think to think about what they modify, what they're actually changing in the sentence.
So verbs are one thing. ... Adverbs can also modify adjectives. They can
also modify adjectives. As an example, we can say that somebody is "really old,"
and if we say "how old?" then we say, "really"! So there is our adverb. We can modify other verbals,
which is pretty cool. So, other verbals. if we say, for instance, "laughing angrily,"
then "angrily" is modifying the verbal, the present participle "laughing." Then we have other
adverbs, which is surprising perhaps, so adverbs can modify adverbs. If we say "too much" ...
then "too" is modifying "much," which is often an adverb. Okay, there's one more, and we actually had
it in our sentence before, so we might as well scroll back up. This is the word "unfortunately,"
and this is the last use of the adverb, where we modify an entire sentence. "Unfortunately" -- it's not
referring to a specific word necessarily, but it's modifying the entire sentence that follows.
Those are adverbs. Let's move on next to prepositions,
and let's pick a different colour. Here, let's go with some kind of blue.
We have a preposition at the end here: "across the lake." And a preposition is a structure word
that relates another word to the rest of the sentence. The word is typically something that
follows, so here we have "across the lake," and we have "lake," which is a noun, as the object of the
preposition. Okay, so "lake" can be classified as a noun. But it's also the object of the preposition.
There we go. And together this forms the prepositional phrase. A prepositional phrase is
extra information in the sentence. It's not usually your subject, or your object, or things like that.
You can often put it in parentheses and the sentence will function fine without it. So when you
are taking apart a sentence it's a great idea just to put these little expressions in parentheses.
Alright, so prepositions are often to do with space and time. ...
There's a few other ones as well, but as you can see here, this is a spatial preposition.
"Across the lake" -- it gives us an indication of where it is,
whereas in an expression like "in the morning" we would be dealing with a preposition of time.
Next we'll talk about conjunctions. Now there are three types of conjunctions,
and we see a couple of them in these sentences. The first type that we'll talk about is called
the subordinating conjunction. Okay, subordinating conjunction ... There's one here.
... The idea with these is that we make one part of the sentence
less important than another. We tie it to something else. Conjunctions are always about tying parts of
the sentence together. In this case, we're saying "Although this" (Bob is a fervent vegetarian) ...
"we also have this." It keeps going, and that means that the second part of the sentence
is the independent clause. It's the important part. It can stand by itself as a sentence.
We can say "he will make an exception for steak." The first part, because it has "although" here ...
"although" is now making this dependent. It's making this first part not quite as crucial. "Although Bob
is a fervent vegetarian" ... Well, we can't have that as a complete sentence. There are lots of these
subordinating conjunctions. They are words like "if" and "although" and "because" and so on and so forth.
The second category of conjunction is very small. It's what we call a correlative conjunction, and
we have one in the second sentence here: "Not only ... but also." So what we see here is
that these conjunctions are working together. They're working together as a tag team you might
say. And they're tying different parts of the sentence together. The last type
of conjunction is what we call a coordinating conjunction. So a coordinating conjunction.
There are seven of these, and I think it's really worth memorizing them. These are "and"
and "but," "nor," "for," and "or," and "so" and "yet." Alright, they tie together equal elements. For instance, the
word "and" we can use to tie together two nouns -- let's say "Bob and Martha." We can tie together two
big clauses if we like. There are lots of things we can do with coordinating conjunctions.
Now when it comes to conjunctions there is another subcategory that's important to know about,
and we call these conjunctive adverbs. ...
I'm not going to get into a lot of detail here, but basically these are
words that don't tie together parts of the same sentence, but they tend to tie together
different sentences, or clauses that are separated by a semicolon let's say. These are words like
"moreover," and "however," and "nevertheless," and so on and so forth. So it's important to know
about these because what people often do is they use them in the middle of a sentence,
and then they create a grammatical problem because they're they're not using them properly.
Our last part of speech is the interjection ... and all this is
is an expression of emotion. If i say "oh" or "ouch" or "wow," and the list goes on, it's hard to
classify these words as a different part of speech. So we call them interjections,
and they're fairly easy to spot typically. So not much to worry about here. Those are the eight
different parts of speech. This is a whirlwind tour but I hope that you find this useful
as you try to figure out how sentences operate and function, and if you want more information [then]
you can always dig into a particular part of speech and learn a bit more about it.