Every word in the English language has a specific job. For
example, look at the following sentence.
Emma is playing with a doll.
Every word in the above sentence has a specific job. The
first word, "Emma", tells us the name of the person whom we are
talking about. The next word, "is", links "Emma" to the
rest of the sentence. The next word, "playing", tells us what Emma
is doing. And so on.
There are 8 categories of jobs for words in the English language,
and they are called the parts of speech. Here is a brief summary of the eight
parts of speech; in the following sections, we will explain each of these in
more detail.
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Parts of Speech
|
Definition
|
|
Noun
|
The name of a person, place, thing,
quality or idea.
|
|
Pronoun
|
A word used in place of a noun.
|
|
Verb
|
A word that specifies an action or
state of being.
|
|
Conjunction
|
A word that joins other words,
phrases or clauses.
|
|
Adjective
|
A word that describes a noun.
|
|
Adverb
|
A word that describes a verb, an adjective
or another adverb.
|
|
Preposition
|
A word that describes a specific
relationship between nouns (or pronouns) and the rest of the sentence.
|
|
Interjection
|
A word that adds emphasis or
emotion to the sentence.
|
A word is not always tied to one job. In other words, the
same word can play two different roles in two different sentences. For
example, consider the following two sentences.
Every day, James and Jake swim
in the community swimming pool.
My swim yesterday was quite fun.
In the first sentence, the word “swim” acts as a verb, while
in the second sentence, it acts as a noun.