English
English words have been traditionally classified into eight lexical categories, or parts of speech (and are still done so in most dictionaries):
- Noun: any abstract or concrete entity; a person (police officer, Michael), place (coastline, London), thing (necktie, television), idea (happiness), or quality (bravery)
- Pronoun: any substitute for a noun or noun phrase
- Adjective: any qualifier of a noun
- Verb: any action (walk), occurrence (happen), or state of being (be)
- Adverb: any qualifier of an adjective, verb, clause, sentence, or other adverb
- Preposition: any establisher of relation and syntactic context
- Conjunction: any syntactic connector
- Interjection: any emotional greeting (or "exclamation")
Although these are the traditional eight English parts of speech, modern linguists have been able to classify English words into even more specific categories and sub-categories based on function.
The four main parts of speech in English, namely nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, are labelled form classes as well. This is because prototypical members of each class share the ability to change their form by accepting derivational or inflectional morphemes. The term form is used because it refers literally to the similarities in shape of the word in its pronunciation and spelling for each part of speech.
Neither written nor spoken English generally marks words as belonging to one part of speech or another, as they tend to be understood in the context of the sentence. Words like neigh, break, outlaw, laser, microwave and telephone might all be either verb forms or nouns. Although -ly is a frequent adverb marker, not all adverbs end in -ly (-wise is another common adverb marker) and not all words ending in -ly are adverbs. For instance, tomorrow, fast, very can all be adverbs, while early, friendly, ugly are all adjectives (though early can also function as an adverb). Verbs can also be used as adjectives (e.g. "The astonished child watched the spectacle unfold" instead of the verb usage "The unfolding spectacle astonished the child"). In such cases, the verb is in its participle form.
In certain circumstances, even words with primarily grammatical functions can be used as verbs or nouns, as in "We must look to the how's and not just the why's" or "Miranda was to-ing and fro-ing and not paying attention".
Read more about this topic: Part Of Speech
Famous quotes containing the word english:
“The English were very backward to explore and settle the continent which they had stumbled upon. The French preceded them both in their attempts to colonize the continent of North America ... and in their first permanent settlement ... And the right of possession, naturally enough, was the one which England mainly respected and recognized in the case of Spain, of Portugal, and also of France, from the time of Henry VII.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... in the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)
“So in Jamaica it is the aim of everybody to talk English, act English and look English. And that last specification is where the greatest difficulties arise. It is not so difficult to put a coat of European culture over African culture, but it is next to impossible to lay a European face over an African face in the same generation.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)