Parts of speech can be identified by four kinds of information:
1)) semantic (the word’s meaning)
2) morphological (the word’s form)
3) syntactic (what other words can ‘go with’ it)
4) grammatical function (how a word works in a phrase or clause)
Note: The parts of speech discussed here are fairly standard for English. Auxiliary verbs are discussed in the section on verbs. Prepositions are part of a larger class of ‘Adpositions,’ a class that includes Postpositions. English doesn’t have postpositions, so they are left out. We will leave the nasty question “What is a word?” to much later in the course.
Subsections of Parts of Speech:
- Verbs
- Nouns
- Pronouns
- Adjectives
- Prepositions
- Adverbs
- Determiners
- Conjunctions
- Interjections
- Back Channels & Discourse Markers