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1.5 The 8 Parts of Speech
We mentioned earlier in “What is grammar?” that a joint study by Harvard University and Google has found that there were 1,022,000 words in English by around December 2010, and that the number of English words was expanding at a rate of 8,500 words per year.
Of all these words, the grammarians classify them into different categories according to the function they play in a sentence, and name the categories “parts of speech.” For example, some words express “action,” which are called “verbs;” others name “things,” and are called “nouns.” Still other words are used to join one word to another word, and they are called “conjunctions.” These are the “building blocks” of a language.
When we want to form a sentence, we use the different categories of words. Each category has its own function. By understanding these categories or these parts of speech, we can better understand how, and why, we structure words together to form sentences.
Different grammarians classify the English words into different number of categories. Depending on where you get your information, you may have come across 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 or more parts of speech here and there. This is natural. Different people, different scholars, different opinions.
Just remember that grammar is an inductive scholarship: first there are the words, then the grammarians try to assign the words into different categories based on attributes they give to the words. Because there are so many words, no matter how careful or diligent they perform the assignment, there are always words that are difficult to be categorized. In grammar, whenever there is a rule, there are always exceptions to the rule.
Here, for no particular reason, we have adopted the categorization of 8 parts of speech, and they are:
1.5.1 Verbs
Action verbs express what is happening (do, work). Stative verbs express a situation (be, feel).
1.5.2 Nouns
Nouns represent people (teacher, Philip), places (street, Asia), things (table, computer) and ideas
(justice, peace).
1.5.3 Adjectives
An adjective is a word that tells us more about a noun (big, yellow, sharp).
1.5.4 Adverbs
Adverbs tell us more about verbs, adjectives or adverbs (hugely, colorfully, extremely).
1.5.5 Pronouns
Pronouns are words like you, theirs, that, some that can take the place of a noun.
1.5.6 Prepositions
A preposition expresses the relationship of a noun or pronoun to another word (at, on, to).
1.5.7 Conjunctions
Conjunctions join two parts of a sentence (and, but, though).
1.5.8 Interjections
Short exclamations with no real grammatical value (oh, dear, ouch).