The 8 parts of speech

Dec 3rd, 2008 | By John Roach | Category: Grammar

We’re going back to the basics here: parts of speech.

Quick, can you name all eight of them?

For those of you who are cheating, here are the answers:

It is important to know them to craft intelligent, and intelligible, sentences. You use them all the time, but if you forget the difference between an adjective and adverb, you wind up coining new usages and infuriating copy editors.

I know you’re busy, so let’s jump right into it. To illustrate, we’ll be considering the following sentence, which is in no way based upon my life.

Naughty John quietly hid his cigarettes under his bed, but he — silly boy! — forgot about his prying mother.

Noun

Step one: Before we can talk about anything, we have to name it. For that, we use nouns. Nouns are people, places, things or ideas.

Naughty John quietly hid his cigarettes under his bed, but he — silly boy! — forgot about his prying mother.

Wow! Five nouns in once sentence. Every sentence requires at least one noun, which serves as the subject — in this case, John. But we’ll talk about subjects some other time.

Verb

Verbs are actions. Nouns do verbs. Another requirement for a sentence, by the way.

Naughty John quietly hid his cigarettes under his bed, but he — silly boy! — forgot about his prying mother.

John, busy beaver that he is, is performing two verbs: “hid” and “forgot.” That’s one more verb than is strictly necessary. In fact, now that we’ve got nouns and verbs under our belts, we can start writing simple sentences; “Jesus wept” is a famous example.

By the way, if you’ve gotten to this point and realized that you can have a sentence with just a verb, you’re wrong. When your mother slaps you on the hand and tells you to “Hush!’ she is using the understood subject — “you.” So what she means is “You, hush.” Remember, do what she means, not what she says.

Pronoun

Aside from used car salesmen, it’s considered dull and a little impolite to use someone’s name over and over. So we’ve devised pronouns, which are nouns that have lost their amateur status.

Naughty John quietly hid his cigarettes under his bed, but he — silly boy! — forgot about his prying mother.

Wait, sorry, pronouns are special nouns that refer to proper nouns. They include he, she, it, they and we. There’s a lot more, including possessive pronouns, but we haven’t got all day.

Adjective

Adjectives answer the question “What kind?”

Naughty John quietly hid his cigarettes under his bed, but he — silly boy! — forgot about his prying mother.

What kind of John? Naughty John. What kind of boy? Silly boy. What kind of mother? Prying mother. Adjectives only modify nouns; they describe the noun in some fashion. Short, tall, skinny, stocky, brick, red, slow, HiFi, etc.

Adverbs

Not content to let nouns have all the modifications, verbs rallied together to demand adverbs.

Naughty John quietly hid his cigarettes under his bed, but he — silly boy! — forgot about his prying mother.

Adverbs tell us how, where, or when something was done. How did John hide his cigarettes? Quietly.

Many adverbs end in –ly. Adverbs can also modify adjectives, clauses and do a whole mess of stuff, but we’ll put that aside. Hey, you get what you paid for.

Preposition

Here’s where things get tricky. Technically, prepositions show the relationship between two nouns. Got that?

Naughty John quietly hid his cigarettes under his bed, but he — silly boy! — forgot about his prying mother.

His cigarettes (noun) are under (preposition) his bed (noun). It is handy to remember that a preposition is based on “position.” I tell people that prepositions are anywhere a fox can be near a log. It can be on a log, under a log, beside a log, above a log, et cetera. Locations aren’t the only prepositions, however; for example, of is a preposition.

To make matters even more confusing, every preposition needs a noun. Together, the preposition and noun form a prepositional phrase (”under his bed”), which acts as an adverb. Seriously, who comes up with this stuff? It’s a miracle anyone learns to speak English.

By the way, do you know why you can’t offer to sleep with the warden to get out of prison? Because it’s improper to end a sentence with a proposition.

Conjunction

Conjunctions join things. They reach across the aisle to pull things together. The canonical conjunction is “and,” but we used “but” in our example, just to be difficult.

Naughty John quietly hid his cigarettes under his bed, but he — silly boy! — forgot about his prying mother.

Conjunctions are a simple subject on the surface, but if you ever want to fry your brain, look them up in a hardcore grammar book and learn all about coordinating and subordinating conjunctions. Then see all the different adverbs that can be conjunctions, too.

Interjection

Interjections don’t mean anything.

Naughty John quietly hid his cigarettes under his bed, but he — silly boy! — forgot about his prying mother.

Seriously, they don’t. They’re just little words or phrases you throw into a sentence.

By the way, when you hit your thumb with a hammer, that word you say is an interjection. Just sayin’.

Well, that’s all of them. Have any questions? Did I confuse you? Or do you just want to know why I didn’t mention articles? Feel free to leave a comment.