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The 8 Parts of Speech PDF
The 8 Parts of Speech PDF
and Rules
Every word is a part of speech. The term “part of speech” refers to the
role a word plays in a sentence. And like any workplace or TV show with
an ensemble cast, these roles were designed to work together.
Read on to learn about the different parts of speech that the words we
use every day fall into, and how we use them together to communicate
ideas clearly.
The 8 parts of speech
1. Nouns
2. Pronouns
Pronouns are the words you substitute for specific nouns when the reader
or listener knows which specific noun you’re referring to.
You might say “Jennifer was supposed to be here at eight,” then follow it
with “she’s always late; next time I’ll tell her to be here a half-hour
earlier.”
3. Adjectives
Adjectives are the words that describe nouns. Think about your favorite
movie. How would you describe it to a friend who’s never seen it?
4. Verbs
These bolded words are verbs. Verbs are words that describe specific
actions, like running, winning, and being amazing.
Not all verbs refer to literal actions, though. Verbs that refer to feelings or
states of being, like to love and to be, are known as nonaction verbs.
Conversely, the verbs that do refer to literal actions are known as action
verbs.
6. Prepositions
Here’s another example: She put the pizza in the oven. Without the
preposition in, we don’t know where the pizza is.
7. Conjunctions
Consider instead: I like marinara sauce and alfredo sauce, but I don’t like
puttanesca sauce.
In this sentence, and and but are the two conjunctions that link your
ideas together.
8. Articles
Like nouns, articles come in two flavors: definite articles and indefinite
articles. And just like the two types of nouns, the type of article you use
depends on how specific you need to be about the thing you’re
discussing.
A definite article describes one specific noun, like the and this. Example:
Did you buy the car?
See how the implication is gone and you’re asking a much more general
question?
>>Read more about articles
Sometimes, it’s not easy to tell which part of speech a word is. Here are a
few easy “hacks” to quickly figure out what part of speech you’re dealing
with:
• If you can swap it out for a noun and the sentence still makes
sense, it’s a pronoun. Example: We played basketball. / Steve and
I played basketball.
• If it’s something you do, and you can modify the sentence to include
the word do, it’s a verb. Examples: I have an umbrella. / I do have
an umbrella.
• If you can remove the word and the sentence still makes sense, but
you lose a detail, the word is most likely an adjective. Example:
She drives a red van. / She drives a van.
• If you can remove the word and the sentence doesn’t make sense,
it’s likely a preposition. Example: I left my notebook on the desk. / I
left my notebook the desk.
And if you’re ever really stumped, just look the word up. Dictionaries
typically list the part of speech a word fits in its entry, and if it fits more
than one part of speech, both are listed with examples.
That brings us to another common issue that can confuse writers and
language learners:
• Work
• Well
• But
And sometimes, words evolve to fit into new parts of speech. One recent
example is the word “adult.” Before the 2010s, adult was primarily a noun
that referred to a fully grown person. It could also be used as an adjective
to refer to specific types of media, like adult contemporary music. But
then, at right about the turn of the 2010s, the word adulting, a brand-new
verb, appeared in the internet lexicon. As a verb, adulting is the act of
doing tasks like paying bills and grocery shopping.
The parts of speech fall into two word classes: open and closed.
Open word classes are parts of speech that regularly acquire new words.
Language evolves, and usually, evolution happens in these parts of
speech: nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs. In 2020, new words
added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary included deepfake,
truthiness, and contactless.
Closed word classes are the parts of speech that don’t regularly add new
words. These parts of speech are more “set in stone” and
include pronouns, conjunctions, articles, and prepositions.