PARTS OF SPEECH

There are eight kinds of words in the English language. Each kind of word plays a particular function in a sentence. These eight kinds of words are called Parts of Speech.

1. Nouns
A noun is used to name a person, place or thing.
For instance: John, Kuala Lumpur, boy, dog, house, town, book etc.


2. Verbs
The verb is the most important part of speech in a sentence. We must have a verb in every sentence. Otherwise, the sentence will be incomplete and meaningless.

Examples: He eats.
She reads.
They fight.
I work.
He runs.


3. Pronouns
A pronoun is a word that takes the place of a noun.

‘He’ for a boy, man and ‘she’ for a girl, woman
‘They’ for more than one person
‘It’ for non- human referent
‘We’, ‘their’, ‘them’ etc

For example: John is a boy. He is tall
Mary is a girl. She is clever.
The dog is a poodle. It is small.

4. Adjectives
An adjective is added to a noun. It tells us more about the person, place or thing named by the Noun.

For example: black dog, beautiful girl, sweet fruit, clever boy etc.



5. Adverbs
An adverb is a word which is added to a verb, an adjective or another adverb. An adverb is said to qualify (to expand the meaning of) the word to which it is added.

For example: Eat slowly. (eat= verb, slowly= adverb)
Very beautiful. (beautiful= adjective, very= adverb)
Too soon. ( soon=adverb, too=adverb)

6. Prepositions
A preposition is a word used to show the relationship between certain words in a sentence.

For instance: The book is on the table.
The book is under the table
The cat is on the chair
The cat sits near the chair.

The words ‘on’, ‘under’, ‘near’ show the relationship between the book and the table and the cat and the chair. They are called preposition.


7. Conjunctions
A conjunction is a word used to join words, groups of words or sentences together.

For example: A man and a boy
Laughed and cried
Right or wrong
I saw it but could not reach it.

8. Interjections
The word interjection means ‘to throw between’. Interjections are words thrown into the sentence to express some sudden strong feeling or emotion such as joy, grief, disgust, excitement, surprise, etc.

For example: Hurrah!, Oh!, Bravo!, Alas!, Hello!, etc.