PART OF SPEECHS

Noun

Nouns are one of the 9 parts of speech. Traditionally nouns were defined as names of people, places or things. But this defintion is now considered inadequate because it excludes nouns like justice or pity. Some modern grammarians, therefore, define nouns syntactically: i.e. nouns are preceded by adjectives, determiners or prepositions and function as the subjects or objects of sentences.

Nouns can be categorized in various ways, as below:

• Common: book, teacher, honesty
• Proper: John, London, Everest

• Count: flower, camera, sheep
• Uncount: luck, money, milk

• Abstract: joy, freedom, misogyny
• Concrete: tree, computer, elbow

• Simple: bus, dictionary, independence
• Compound: bookcase, bus-stop, garden wall

Adjective

Adjectives are one of the 9 parts of speech. They are used to describe nouns, and can either be used attributively:

• It's a beautiful day!

or predicatively:

• Germany is beautiful at this time of year.

There are a few special adjectives in formal English which follow the noun, for example the body politic or malice aforethought.

Verb

Verbs are one of the 8 or 9 word classes (parts of speech), and everybody knows that they are 'doing words': eat, play, run, etc. But what about verbs like: be, have, seem? These do not exactly 'do' anything. Obviously the traditional definition is inadequate, but instead of getting bogged down in trying to find a more exact one, let's look at some of the ways that verbs can be categorized:

• Regular: work-worked-worked; use-used-used
• Irregular: see-saw-seen; do-did-done

• Transitive: break; hit; see
• Intransitive: arrive; sleep; laugh

• Modal: must; should; will; might

• Reflexive: wash oneself; enjoy oneself; behave oneself

• Phrasal: make up; fall through; play down

Adverbs

Adverbs are one of the 9 parts of speech. They are a very mixed bag, and grammarians often disagree whether a particular word or phrase should be classed as an adverb. There is agreement however that they are used to describe manner (beautifully, with the utmost care ), time (now, every Tuesday after school), place (here, behind the bicycle sheds at the back of the sports hall) and degree (extremely, to a large extent). Most adverbs of manner end in -ly:

• It was very foggy so he drove slowly.
• She sang beautifully.
• You can speak English very well!

Determiner (article)

The definite article the and the indefinite articles a, an belong to the group of words called determiners. Other determiners are: each, all, some, this, many, no, etc.

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The English determiner system is extremely complex and causes many ESL students serious difficulties, particularly those students whose native languages do not have articles, such as Japanese, Korean or Russian. But even German students, whose article system is similar to English, make mistakes when the systems diverge. Examples:

• My father is teacher.
• Do you play piano?
• The life is hard!
• The nature is very nice at this time of year.

Fortunately mistakes in the use of articles rarely impede communication!

Conjunction

Conjunctions are one of the 9 parts of speech. They are used to join clauses to form sentences. There are two types of conjunction: coordinating and subordinating. Coordinating conjunctions join two clauses of equal 'value'. The coordinating conjunctions in the following examples are shown in bold:

• I like coffee but I don't like tea!
• Stop that or I will tell the teacher.
• She runs every day so she is very fit.

A subordinating conjunction is used to introduce a subordinate or dependent clause:

• I haven't eaten marmite since I came to Germany.
• Although it was wet, we decided to have a picnic.
• Please tell me as soon as he arrives.

Pronoun

Pronouns are one of the 8 or 9 parts of speech (word classes). Of course, modern grammarians do not fully agree on the definition of a pronoun and which words should be so classed. Traditionally pronouns have been defined as 'standing for' or 'replacing nouns', and this is probably good enough for non-linguists. Here are some of the ways that they can be categorized:

• Personal: I, we, they, it
• Relative: who, which, whose, that
• Reflexive: myself, themselves
• Possessive: my, your, his, theirs
• Interrogative: who?, whom? what?
• Indefinite: one, everything, somebody

Interjection

Interjections are one of the nine parts of speech - some modern grammarians classify them as single-word sentences. Interjections are words that usually express an emotion and are followed by an exclamation mark. Contrast interjections with exclamations. Here are some common interjections:

• Oops!
• Wow!
• Ouch!
• Yuk!

Preposition

Prepositions are one of the 9 parts of speech. They often introduce an expression of place or time: under the bed, on the wall, in January, at the weekend. They are also used after adjectives and verbs in certain fixed expressions like: tired of, angry about, to give up, to make do with.

There are quite a few multi-word prepositions, e.g. in front of, close to, by means of, in accordance with.

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Prepositions can be difficult for ESL students because very often there is no one-to-one transference from their own language. Here are some examples from German:

• by bus - mit dem Bus (with the bus)
• by chance - durch Zufall (through chance)
• married to - verheiratet mit (married with)
• something for headaches - etwas gegen Kopfschmerzen (against)
• to be interested in - sich interessiern für (be interested for)
• to be afraid of - Angst haben vor (be afraid before, in front of)