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
- Prepositions
- Conjunctions
- Interjections
- Expletives
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
|