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All words belong to categories called word classes (or parts of speech) according to the
part they play in a sentence. The main word classes in English are listed below.
Noun
Verb
Adjective
Adverb
Pronoun
Preposition
Conjunction
Determiner
Exclamation
Noun
A noun is a word that identifies:
a person (man, girl, engineer, friend)
a thing (horse, wall, flower, country)
an idea, quality, or state (anger, courage, life, luckiness)
Read more about nouns.
Verb
A verb describes what a person or thing does or what happens. For example, verbs
describe:
an action jump, stop, explore
an event snow, happen
a situation be, seem, have
a change evolve, shrink, widen
Read more about verbs.
Adjective
An adjective is a word that describes a noun, giving extra information about it. For
example:
an exciting adventure
a green apple
a tidy room
Read more about adjectives.
Adverb
An adverb is a word thats used to give information about a verb, adjective, or other
adverb. They can make the meaning of a verb, adjective, or other adverb stronger or
weaker, and often appear between the subject and its verb (She nearly lost everything.)
Read more about adverbs.
Pronoun
Pronouns are used in place of a noun that is already known or has already
been mentioned. This is often done in order to avoid repeating the noun. For example:
Laura left early because she was tired.
Anthony brought the avocados with him.
That is the only option left.
Something will have to change.
Personal pronouns are used in place of nouns referring to specific people or things, for
example I, me, mine, you, yours,his, her, hers, we, they, or them. They can be divided
into various different categories according to their role in a sentence, as follows:
subjective pronouns
objective pronouns
possessive pronouns
reflexive pronouns
Read more about pronouns.
Preposition
A preposition is a word such as after, in, to, on, and with. Prepositions are usually used
in front of nouns or pronouns and they show the relationship between the noun or
pronoun and other words in a sentence. They describe, for example, the position of
something, the time when something happens, or the way in which something is done.
Read more about prepositions.
Conjunction
A conjunction (also called a connective) is a word such as and, because, but, for, if,
or, and when. Conjunctions are used to connect phrases, clauses, and sentences.The
two main kinds are known as coordinating conjunctions and subordinating conjunctions.
Read more about conjunctions.
Determiner
A determiner is a word that introduces a noun, such
as a/an, the, every, this, those, or many(as
in a dog, the dog, this dog, those dogs, every dog, many dogs).
The determiner the is sometimes known as the definite article and the determiner a (or an) as
the indefinite article.
The adverb
The traditional approach to adverbs has been to assign mainly those words which are made from
adjectives by the addition of the ending ly (quickly, hopelessly), plus certain other words which are
difficult to classify, like not, just and soon. Their main function is to qualify the action of the verb in the
clause in some way, but they can also be used to add more information to an adjective or other adverb
e.g. awfully good, incredibly slowly. The class of adverbs is very wide-ranging in form and is used to
add comments to many of the other word classes.
The preposition
Prepositions allow us to talk about the way in which two parts of a sentence are related to each other.
They include words like in, on, under, beside, through, inside, before, opposite. More often than not,
these relationships are to do with either time or space, but other types of relationship, such as
possession, cause and effect and method can be expressed by using prepositions. The words
themselves are generally short and simple but some prepositions are multi-word units; for
example, out of, by means of, in spite of, instead of, up to etc. Unless they are part of a verb
(getin, pick up, switch off), prepositions are always followed by a phrase containing a noun at
school, in the summer, over the moon and so on.
The adjective
An adjective gives the reader or speaker extra information about a noun or delimits it in some way. It
can occur in two positions in a phrase:
before the noun as in clear water, beautiful beaches, a terrible decision. The adjectives in these
examples are said to be attributive,
following any form of the verb be (e.g. am, is, was, been) and similar verbs
(seem, appear,become) as in the water became clear, the beaches are beautiful. These adjectives
are inpredicative position.
The pronoun
Pronouns are usually treated as a special sub-class of nouns. This is because they stand in for a noun
or group of nouns. They are limited in number and belong to what is called a closed set, that is, a
group of words to which new members are, for practical purposes, not allowed. Some examples of
pronouns are: I, you, he, she, our, its, something, anyone and so on. Thus, instead of saying, Bills
arrived. Bills in the lounge, we prefer Bills arrived. Hes in the lounge. Or a person called for you; better
would be someone called for you. There are several other words which fall into this class; for
example (the) one(s), when used to replace dishes in the example: pass me the dishes the ones on the
top shelf.
The conjunction
It would be very unusual for anyone to either speak or write completely in simple sentences; instead
we tend to use a mixture of simple, compound and complex sentences. One way to create longer,
more complicated sentences is to use conjunctions. As we have already noted in the section on types
of clause, conjunctions serve to connect two or more clauses, phrases or words together to make
longer constructions. In the following examples, the conjunction is in bold:
In the first sentence, answer is being used as a noun note the attributive
adjectiveimmediate and the word an, both indicative of a following noun.
In the second, answer is a verb the subject he and the ending ed show this.
While in the third, answer tells you what kind of sheet is being talked about and is, therefore,
an adjective.
This flexibility in word class membership is a peculiar feature of English among the European
languages, many of which would require different endings to show the class of the word.