Father of Modern Medicine - Ibine Sina

Basic Grammar: Parts of Speech

Basic Grammar: Parts of Speech

English Grammar is traditionally divided into parts of speech. Here, we add an extra category, the expletive. Other categorisations of language structures enable us to describe the function of a word or words in a sentence. The parts of speech, however, can be thought of as the building blocks of the language; in English they are arranged in a way that is typical for English. These building blocks are used to construct phrases, clauses, and sentences.

• Nouns
• Articles
• Verbs and Verbals
• Pronouns
• Adjectives
• Adverbs
• Conjunctive Adverbs
• Prepositions
• Conjunctions
• Interjections
• Expletives

Nouns

A noun is the name of a person, place, thing, or idea. Most nouns may be singular (i.e., represent one person, place, thing, or idea) or plural (i.e., represent more than one person, place, thing, or idea). A plural noun usually ends with an s. There are also many irregular plural forms that must be learned and recognized.

Examples:				Singular		Plural
		Person		boy		boys
				woman		women
		Place		Lake Erie		Great Lakes
				Vancouver
		Thing		house		houses
				tree		trees
		Idea		democracy		democracies
				freedom		freedoms
				love		love

Types of Nouns

A noun may belong to more than one of the following groups.

Proper

• name a particular person, place, or thing
• require a capital letter

Examples:		Person		Place		Thing
		Anne		Hyde Park		(the) Bible
		Gandhi		Mt. Everest		Concorde
		Mr. Lee		Vancouver		Ford Escort

Common

• name a class of persons, places, or things
• do not require a capital letter

Examples:		Person		Place		Thing
		child		city		chair
		doctor		home		expression
		singer		restaurant		snow

Collective

• name of groups of persons, places, and things
• may be singular or plural

Examples:		Person		Place		Thing
		club		forest		decade
		jury		mall		dozen
		team				herd
						flock

Abstract

• name of things not knowable through the five senses (touch, hear, see, smell, taste)

Examples:

humour, fatigue, liberty, love, refusal, truth

Concrete

• name things that are knowable through the five senses (touch, hear, see, smell, and taste)

Examples:		Touch		Hear		See		Smell		Taste
		snow		cry		cloud		fumes		coffee
		tree		sigh		landscape		odour		hot dog
		wind		whisper		moon		perfume		salt

Count

• name people, places, and things that can be counted, as in one pen, two pens
• have irregular forms where the plural is quite different from the singular form, or have the same form as the singular, e.g., sheep.

Examples:		Regular Countables				Irregular Countables
		cat		cats		child		children
		house		houses		goose		geese
		husband		husbands		person		people
		socialist		socialists		woman		women

Non-count or mass

• name things that cannot be counted

Examples:

advice, information, news, rice, sugar, water