Parts of Speech in English [English Grammar Lessons]
A part of speech is a category of words which have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assigned to the same part of speech generally display similarly—they play similar roles within the grammatical structure of sentences. Commonly listed English parts of speech are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection (08 parts of speech).
Many English words can belong to more than one part of speech. Words like neigh, break, outlaw, laser, microwave, and telephone might all be either verbs or nouns.
This is a summary of the eight parts of speech.
Parts of Speech Table
Parts of speech
| Functions | Example words |
Example sentences
|
| Noun | a word or lexical item denoting any abstract or concrete entity | a person (police officer, Michael), place (coastline, London), thing (necktie, television), idea (happiness), or quality (bravery) | The cat sat on the mat. |
| Verb | a word denoting an action (walk), occurrence (happen), or state of being (be) | an action (walk), occurrence (happen), or state of being (be) | That idea is interesting Tell me something interesting. |
| Adjective | a modifier of a noun or pronoun | big, brave | That’s an interesting idea |
| Adverb | a modifier of an adjective, verb, or other adverb | very, quite | Frankly, I don’t believe you |
| Pronoun | a substitute for a noun or noun phrase | them, he | That reminds me of something. |
| Preposition | a word that relates a noun to another word or phrase in the sentence and aids in syntactic context | in, of | The cat is in the box |
| Conjunction | a syntactic connector; links words, phrases, or clauses | and, but | He is not only handsome, but alsobrilliant. |
| Interjection | an emotional greeting or exclamation | Hurrah, Alas, well | Well, that’s great |
