Part of speech

In grammar, a part of speech (also a word class, a lexical class, or a lexical category) is a linguistic category of words (or more precisely lexical items), which is generally defined by the syntactic or morphological behaviour of the lexical item in question. Common linguistic categories include noun and verb, among others. There are open word classes, which constantly acquire new members, and closed word classes, which acquire new members infrequently if at all. Almost all languages have the lexical categories noun and verb, but beyond these, there are significant variations in different languages. For example, Japanese has as many as three classes of adjectives where English has one; Chinese, Korean and Japanese have nominal classifiers whereas European languages do not; many languages do not have a distinction between adjectives and adverbs, adjectives and verbs or adjectives and nouns etc. This variation in the number of categories and their identifying properties entails that analysis is done for each individual language. Nevertheless, the labels for each category are assigned based on universal criteria. By the end of the 2nd century BC, the classification scheme had been expanded into eight categories, seen in the Art of Grammar :
1. Noun: a part of speech inflected for case, signifying a concrete or abstract entity 2. Verb: a part of speech without case inflection, but inflected for tense, person and number, signifying an activity or process performed or undergone 3. Participle: a part of speech sharing the features of the verb and the noun 4. Interjection: a part of speech expressing emotion alone 5. Pronoun: a part of speech substitutable for a noun and marked for person 6. Preposition: a part of speech placed before other words in composition and in syntax 7. Adverb: a part of speech without inflection, in modification of or in addition to a verb 8. Conjunction: a part of speech binding together the discourse and filling gaps in its interpretation

English
A tree diagram of English categories in accordance with modern linguistic studies

English words have been traditionally classified into eight lexical categories, or parts of speech (and are still done so in most dictionaries):
y y y y y y y y

Noun: any abstract or concrete entity Pronoun: any substitute for a noun or noun phrase Adjective: any qualifier of a noun Verb: any action or state of being Adverb: any qualifier of an adjective, verb, or other adverb Preposition: any establisher of relation and syntactic context Conjunction: any syntactic connector Interjection: any emotional greeting (or "exclamation")

Although these are the traditional eight English parts of speech, modern linguists have been able to classify English words into even more specific categories and sub-categories based on function. The four main parts of speech in English, namely nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, are labelled form classes as well. This is because prototypical members of each class share the ability to change their form by accepting derivational or inflectional morphemes. The term form is used because it refers literally to the similarities in shape of the word in its pronunciation and spelling for each part of speech.

Neither written nor spoken English generally marks words as belonging to one part of speech or another, as they tend to be understood in the context of the sentence. Words like neigh, break, outlaw, laser, microwave and telephone might all be either verb forms or nouns. Although -ly is a frequent adverb marker, not all adverbs end in -ly (-wise is another common adverb marker) and not all words ending in -ly are adverbs. For instance, tomorrow, fast, very can all be adverbs, while early, friendly, ugly are all adjectives (though early can also function as an adverb). In certain circumstances, even words with primarily grammatical functions can be used as verbs or nouns, as in "We must look to the hows and not just the whys" or "Miranda was to-ing and fro-ing and not paying attention".

Parts of Speech Table

This is a summary of the 8 parts of speech. part of speech Verb function or "job" example words (to) be, have, do, like, work, sing, can, must pen, dog, work, music, town, London, teacher, John a/an, the, 69, some, good, big, red, well, interesting quickly, silently, well, badly, very, really I, you, he, she, some to, at, after, on, but example sentences EnglishClub.com is a web site. I like EnglishClub.com.

action or state

Noun

thing or person

This is my dog. He lives in my house. We live in London.

Adjective

describes a noun

My dog is big. I like big dogs. My dog eats quickly. When he is very hungry, he eats really quickly. Tara is Indian. She is beautiful. We went to school on Monday. I like dogs and I like cats. I like cats and dogs. I like dogs but I don't like cats. Ouch! That hurts! Hi! How are you? Well, I don't know.

Adverb Pronoun Preposition

describes a verb, adjective or adverb replaces a noun links a noun to another word joins clauses or sentences or words short exclamation, sometimes inserted into a sentence

Conjunction

and, but, when

Interjection

oh!, ouch!, hi!, well

Verbs may be treated as two different parts of speech: o Lexical Verbs (work, like, run) o Auxiliary Verbs (be, have, must) Determiners may be treated as a separate part of speech, instead of being categorized under Adjectives

Parts of Speech Examples

Here are some sentences made with different English parts of speech:
verb noun verb noun verb verb

Stop!

John

works.

John

is

working.

pronoun

verb

noun

noun

verb

adjective

noun

She

loves

animals.

Animals

like

kind

people.

noun

verb

noun

adverb

noun

verb

adjective

noun

Tara

speaks

English

well.

Tara

speaks

good

English.

pronoun

verb

preposition

adjective

noun

adverb

She

ran

to

the

station

quickly.

pron.

verb

adj.

noun

conjunction

pron.

verb

pron.

She

likes

big

snakes

but

hate

them.

Here is a sentence that contains every part of speech:

interjection pron. conj. adj. noun verb prep. noun adverb

Well,

she

and

young

John

walk

to

school

slowly.

Project in English

Submitted by:

ANGELICA JOY C. MEDRANO

Submitted to:

MRS. PAMELA ESTIGOY