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Parts of Speech
Today we're going to look at parts of speech. If you've ever
been to school, this is a review for you. But I can't talk to you about the
complexities of language until I remind you of the basics.
First we've got the noun.
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| Click to go to Merriam-Webster's definition of "noun" |
A noun is a word that is the
name of something. It can be a...
Person
Animal
Place
Thing
Quality
Idea
Action
So... teacher is a noun. That's me; I'm a person. And cat is a noun,
obviously, a cat is an animal. Mexico
is a noun. It's a proper noun, because it's the actual name of a place. Banana is a noun; it's a thing. Excitement is a noun, a quality of
every English student, right? Existentialism
is a noun. It's an idea which you'll find out more about when you read
Camus. And finally, shopping is a
noun. What did you do yesterday? I went shopping.
Did you know that nouns are usually the
first parts of speech that babies use?
So the next important part of speech is
the verb.
 |
| Click to go to Merriam-Webster's definition of "verb." |
You
know a verb is an action word, like run or eat. Don't forget to be is also a verb; it expresses a state of being. And have is
also a verb. There's no actual action, like run, but it expresses an occurrence.
So now that we have nouns and verbs, we can
make sentences. All you need for a sentence is two words: a noun and a verb.
 |
| Yes, this is a sentence. |
This
is a really short, but perfectly legit sentence:
Now we can pad it out with
some other parts of speech.
You've
got your adjectives, used to describe nouns:
You've
got your adverbs, used to describe verbs :
And
you've got your pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections, and
articles.
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| pronoun |
 |
| preposition |
 |
| conjunction |
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| interjection |
 |
| article |
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