Welcome to another refresher course in English grammar. Today we’re reviewing the parts of speech — the categories words are assigned based on their function. There are eight parts of speech, some of which have only a few member words, while others contain thousands of words. And thanks to the many quirks of the English language, some words operate as multiple parts of speech. Let’s review the basics of these language building blocks.
Tip: For memory aid, use the mnemonic “PAPA N VIC.” It may sound like an Italian takeout joint, but it stands for pronoun, adjective, preposition, adverb, noun, verb, interjection, conjunction.
When you first learned about the fundamentals of English grammar in elementary school, this is probably where your teacher started. A noun is a word that names a person, place, concept, or object — basically, any type of “thing.” For example, “cat,” “New York City,” “library,” “Taylor Swift,” and “optimism” are nouns. A proper noun is a name or a title for a specific thing — “New York City” and “Taylor Swift” are proper nouns. You can usually spot a proper noun because it’s always capitalized (unless it’s a specific stylized brand name, such as iPhone). A common noun is a generic name for a given thing: “cat,” “library,” and “optimism,” for example.
Pronouns are misunderstood a lot these days, but as a part of speech, a pronoun is a word that replaces a specific noun when the reader or listener already knows which noun is being referred to. It’s both shorthand and a way of making writing and speech less repetitive. It might go something like this: “Megan said I could borrow her car, but she already lent it to her brother.” The pronouns “she/her” act as a stand-in for “Megan,” and “it” stands in for “car.”
When using pronouns, it’s important to be clear what they’re standing in for. Take this example: “I saw Megan and Claire earlier, and she said I could borrow her car. Because the first clause of the sentence contains two names, it’s unclear which name “she/her” is replacing. It would be more clear to say, “I saw Megan and Claire earlier, and Megan said I could borrow her car.” Now we know that “her” is a stand-in for Megan, not Claire.
There are an almost unlimited number of nouns in the English language, but there’s a much smaller set of pronouns. Personal pronouns refer to people: I, you, he, she, we, they, me, him, her, us, and them. “It” is also considered a personal pronoun, but it stands in for non-people nouns. Interrogative pronouns introduce questions in which a noun is the answer: what, which, who, whom, and whose. Demonstrative pronouns (this, that, these, and those) are used to indicate something is separate from something else. We can use both interrogative and demonstrative pronouns together: “Whose keys are these? Those are Jose’s keys.”
Verbs are words that designate actions (nouns and pronouns perform these actions). A verb might also refer to a feeling or state of being, such as “to love” or “to be.”. When the verb has the word “to” paired with it, that’s the infinitive form; it changes form based on the subject (the noun or pronoun performing the action) and the tense (past, present, future). For example: to run, you run, I ran, we were running, they will run.
That’s just a sampling of how to use a regular verb, but things get very complicated with irregular verbs, such as “go” (with the past tense of “went”).
Adjectives are words that describe nouns. In the phrase “big house on a tall hill overlooking a blue lake,” “big,” “tall,” and “blue” are adjectives. They provide more description and context than the noun by itself. When multiple words work together to describe a noun, we call that an adjective phrase (for example: “too big to fail”).
Articles (the words “a,” “an,” and “the”) are considered adjectives because they pair with nouns to help describe them. For example, “the apple” (meaning a specific one) is an important distinction from “an apple” (meaning any apple).
Similar to adjectives, adverbs are descriptive words, but instead of describing nouns, they describe verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs. In other words, they describe a way of doing something, rather than a thing itself. Take this example: “The cat ran very quickly across the room.” “Very” and “quickly” are both adverbs — “quickly” describes how the cat ran, and “very” quantifies how quickly the cat ran. Words that end in “-ly” are usually adverbs, but not all adverbs end in “-ly.” Words in the latter subgroup include “never,” “often,” “sometimes,” “again,” “meanwhile,” “instead,” “better,” and “best” — just to list a few.
Prepositions articulate the relationship between other words in the sentence; examples include “up,” “against,” “in,” and “below.” Most frequently, prepositions describe direction, time, location, or space, though they can be more abstract than that. They generally identify where something is or when something happened. For example: “I left my jacket at the theater after we saw a movie.” In this sentence, “at” describes where the jacket was left and “after” describes when it was left there.
Editor’s note: Don’t believe the rule about not ending your sentences with prepositions. It’s old-fashioned guidance, and it’s now perfectly acceptable.
If the Schoolhouse Rock! song “Conjunction Junction” isn’t playing in your head, we’ll elaborate. Conjunctions are connective words such as “and,” “but,” or “if.” They make it possible to write or say complex sentences that express multiple ideas more elegantly than writing them out as separate sentences. Consider this example: “I like cats. I like dogs. I don’t like birds.”
While it’s technically grammatically correct to express your ideas this way, it’s not the most efficient or refined way to do so, and it comes across as quite choppy. Using conjunctions, you could express the same sentiment this way: “I like cats and dogs, but I don’t like birds.”
Wow! We’ve reached the eighth part of speech: interjections. An interjection is an abrupt remark or exclamation made to express a sudden feeling, such as the “Wow!” at the beginning of this paragraph. Other examples include “Ouch!” “Yikes!” “Oh my!” and “Oops!” Interjections can describe negative or positive emotions, and in general there aren’t a lot of rules about how to use them (except, perhaps, to do it sparingly). An interjection word is usually accompanied by an exclamation point, but it’s not required. You might want to treat them a bit like pronouns, in that they require some context. An interjection doesn’t make a lot of sense without explaining why you suddenly came to that emotion.
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