Parts of Speech

Have a look at this beautiful sentence, “She quickly climbed up the tall mountain with grace and determination.“

Let’s quickly look at some of these words to see what type of words they are.

Verb: climbed

• Noun: mountain
• Adjective: tall
• Adverb: quickly
• Preposition: up

So, lets talk about each of those so you can understand the job they do.

Parts of Speech: Nouns

Let’s start with verbs. A verb is a word that describes an action or a state of being. For example, “run,” “jump,” “be,” and “eat.” Verbs are the most important part of a sentence because they tell us what the subject is doing. Examples:

• “She runs in the park every morning.”
• “He is happy.”

A noun is a word that represents a person, place, thing, or idea. For example, “dog,” “city,” “book,” and “mountain”. Nouns are often used as the subject or the object of a verb. Examples:

• “The cat is sleeping.“

Here ‘the cat’ is a noun and it is the subject of the sentence.

• “The plane flew through the sky.“

In this sentence we have 2 nouns. ‘The plane’ is the subject of the sentence and ‘The sky’ is the object’

In our original sentence the word ‘mountain’ is the only noun, and it is the object. The subject is ‘She’ this is a pronoun. A pronoun is word which refers to a noun. We use them so that we don’t need to keep repeating their names. Some other pronouns are He, he, it, and they.

Parts of Speech: Adjectives

An adjective is a word that describes a noun. Adjectives tell us more about the noun, such as its size, color, or quality. For example, “big,” “red,” and “happy.” In English adjectives come before the noun they modify. For example;

• “She is a beautiful singer.“

We can have more than one adjective to describe a noun.

• “The fast, red car.“

There is one adjective in our original sentence. Can you see what it is? It is ‘tall’, it is describing the mountain.

Adverbs

An adverb describes a verb, adjective or another adverb. Adverbs tell us how, when, or where it was done. For example, “quickly,” “loudly,” and “well.” Adverbs often end in “ly.” Examples:

“She sings beautifully.”

• “He eats loudly.“

In out original sentence the is one adverb. Can you see what it is? It is ‘quickly’, it is giving us more information about  how she ‘climbed’.

Propositions

A preposition is a word that shows the relationship between a noun and other words in a sentence. Prepositions tell us where, when, and how things are related. Examples of prepositions include “in,” “on,” “at,” “with,” and “by.” For example:

• “The cat is on the table.”
• “I’ll meet you at the park.“

There are two prepositions in our original sentence. Can you see what they are? ‘up’ tells us the direction she climbed the mountain. And ‘with’ tells us that the nouns ‘grace’ and ‘determination’ are how she climbed.

So, you can see how it is important to understand the different parts of speech and use them, because they form the building blocks of the English language. By recognizing and producing these patterns, you will be able describe things, express yourself with much more sophistication and be able to understand English with much more detail.