Parts of Speech: Verbs, Adjectives, Conjunctions - English Grammar (2/3)

Hi everyone. It's Jennifer. Are you ready to continue our review of the parts of speech in English?

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so I can easily share more English lessons and more practice tasks with you in the future.

There are 9 parts of speech that I'd like to cover. Do you remember how I decided to break this lesson down?

In Part 1, we talked about nouns, pronouns, and determiners.

In Part 2, we'll talk about verbs, adjectives, and conjunctions.

In Part 3. we'll look at adverbs, prepositions, and interjections.

I'm excited to look at more grammar with you, so let's get started on Part 2.

Do you remember where my family went last summer?

We know that nouns and pronouns help us talk about people and things

Determiners allow us to be more specific.

But we can't build sentences with only a subject. Every sentence must have a verb. can

Can you identify the subject and verb in each sentence?

Verbs can express an action or a state.

So we have action and non-action verbs.

You may hear the term "stative verb" for verbs that refer to a state.

Let's stick with action and non-action verbs.

Can you tell the difference between the two? Which verbs are action verbs?

Was is a form of BE. It's a non-action verb. It refers to a state.

It's important to understand and recognize the difference because you don't normally use

non-action verbs in progressive verb forms.

In terms of syntax and statement word order, a verb follows a subject: subject + verb.

Verbs have different endings that agree with the subject. This is called subject-verb agreement.

When verbs follow a predictable pattern, we call them regular verbs.

For example, I fly, you fly, she flies.

Or I rent, you rent, she rents.

When verbs don't follow this predictable pattern, we call them irregular verbs. For example, I am, you are, she is.

My children helped me cover some of the irregular verbs in English.

You can see those lessons in the Kid to Kid English series. I'll put the link in the video description.

Action verbs break down further into two groups depending on whether they take an object or not.

Transitive verbs require an object. For example:

rent a car

visit national parks

Intransitive verbs don't require an object. For example: fly.

Some verbs have transitive and intransitive meanings.

When it comes to transitive verbs,

something you have to be careful about is the kind of object a verb can take.

Some verbs are only followed by an infinitive.

That's a two-part verb form with TO + the base verb: to fly, to rent, to visit.

Some verbs are only followed by a gerund. That's the -ing form:

driving, flying, visiting.

I have an older lesson on transitive verbs that can be followed by either an infinitive or a gerund.

But your choice changes the meaning. I'll put that link in the video description.

Gerunds are special because we formed them from verbs,

but once we put on that -ing ending, the word functions as a noun.

so a gerund can be a subject, an object, or a complement.

What's a complement? Well, let's go back to non-action verbs for a moment.

You'll hear teachers talk about linking verbs. These are verbs that link the subject to a complement.

We became excited.

We felt tired after the long drive to Wyoming. The road trip seemed endless.

Devil's Tower is a national monument.

Subject complements are often adjectives or nouns. They define the subject or complete its meaning.

Linking verbs include...

Here's another group of verbs: auxiliary verbs, but I prefer the shorter term - helping verbs.

We use helping verbs to form questions and make negative sentences in simple tenses.

Notice in those examples how the helping verb changes form to agree with the subject

and reflect the time period. But the main verb remains a base verb. It doesn't change.

We can also use helping verbs for emphasis.

I know you aren't going to South Dakota or Wyoming any time soon, but if you ever do decide to go,

I'll give you some good tips

Perhaps we can look more in detail at this use of helping verbs in a future video.

In progressive verb forms, we use the helping verb BE.

Progressive verb forms use BE + the present participle. That's the -ing form.

In perfect verb forms, we use the helping verb HAVE.

Have you ever heard of the wind cave national park?

I've taken my children to visit a few different caves?

Perfect verb forms use HAVE + a past participle.

That's the -ed form of a regular verb or the third form of an irregular verb,

Such as: eat, ate, eaten. I've eaten.

I'd eaten.

To review all verb tenses in English, check out my playlist on this topic. I'll include the link in the video description.

Let's talk about a very important group of helping verbs: modal verbs.

Modal verbs like will help us talk about future events or actions

Modal's like WOULD and COULD help us form conditional sentences.

Modal verbs do not change form to agree with the subject and number.

The same form of a modal verb is used for all subjects:

I must, you must, he must.

Modal verbs will have to be a whole other series of lessons because there are many uses.

You want me to cover modal verbs, please like this video

so I know that you like grammar and you value my grammar lessons.

A quick overview of modal verbs is that they combined with a main verb to express different ideas.

For example:

necessity

certainty

and ability.

With modal verbs we can give advice,

give permission or a warning,

make guesses or express possibilities,

and more.

Check out the video description for a link to a lesson I have on modal verbs and past possibilities.

A final way to categorize verbs is to talk about active and passive verbs.

This is a broad topic, but basically active verbs focus on the doer of the action,

the one who performs the action.

Passive verbs shift the focus to the receiver of the action.

Active verbs have an object.

Passive verbs take that object and make it the subject of the sentence.

We usually form the passive with the helping verb BE and then the past participle.

This is our main verb.

The past participle is the -ed form of a regular verb or the third form of an irregular verb,

like eat, ate, eaten.

It's possible to form the passive with other helping verbs like GET. GET can sound more formal

Or GET in the passive can express the start of some state.

A special group of passive verbs are the verbs we use to form the stative passive.

The stative passive use is similar in structure, but the meaning doesn't imply that an action was received.

We use the state of passive to express a state in detail.

So we still have the helping verb BE and a past participle,

But no one performed an action. We're talking about states in these stative passive examples.

We're talking about location and composition.

If you'd like more practice with the stative passive, I'll include the link to that lesson in the video description.

I mentioned in Part 1 that some words can belong to more than one word class.

That's true of some verbs and adjectives.

Consider the word "injured."

You can't always tell by looking at a word what part of speech it is.

You need to know what meaning or meanings the word has.

How many ways can the word function in a sentence?

On the one hand, I can say no one got injured.

"Got injured" is my verb. It's a passive verb.

On the other hand, I can talk about an injured hiker.

Then I'm using "injured" as an adjective.

I can easily tell that in "injured hiker"... "injured" is an adjective because adjectives often come before nouns.

When adjectives come before nouns they become part of the noun phrase.

That bit of knowledge will help you form sentences correctly, so let's talk more in detail about adjectives.

Adjectives describe nouns or pronouns. They answer the question: What kind? Or perhaps, which one?

If you remember what adjectives do and what questions they answer, you'll be able to tell the difference between

participles used as adjectives and

participles used as verbs.

Do you see the difference? Take a look.

In these examples, I'm using participles as adjectives.

Some people call them participial adjectives. We can call them -ed and -ing adjectives.

We formed these words from verbs, but they behave as adjectives.

The -ed adjectives have a passive meaning, and they generally focus on people's feelings or states.

How do you feel? Tired, bored, surprised.

The -ing adjectives have an active meaning and generally focus on the impact or effect

something or someone can have.

What's it like? Amazing, interesting, boring, exciting.

Participial adjectives, like any adjectives, can have different positions in a sentence. Let's talk more about this.

I said that adjectives often come before nouns.

When they do, we call them attributive adjectives. Here are some examples.

Some adjectives like BIG and LONG are commonly used before nouns.

Other nouns tend to follow verbs, so we use them as subject complements after linking verbs.

These adjectives are called predicative adjectives. They're not part of the subject. They're part of the predicate.

Adjectives can help us make comparisons. That's when we use comparative and superlative adjectives.

Comparative adjectives are used for comparing two things or two people.

Superlative adjectives allow us to name one person or thing that is above or below all others in some way.

Comparative and superlative adjectives are usually formed from qualitative adjectives -

adjectives that describe a quality. For that reason, they're also called descriptive adjectives.

We usually don't have comparative and superlative forms of classifying adjectives.

For example, "a national park." We don't talk about one park being more national than another.

It's just a type of park a national park.

Maybe one park is more interesting than another, but certainly not more or less national.

With more than one quality, we need to know the order of adjectives. We usually follow this pattern:

Some sources may recommend a slightly different pattern, but there won't be too much variation from the pattern I just showed you.

Most everyone would agree with the word order in the following phrases:

We can also have a noun before another noun, as in "a family car."

"Family" behaves like an adjective describing "car."

We call it a noun modifier and it goes last on our list.

We can use other combinations to form compound adjectives.

They include: a noun + adjective

adjective + noun

noun + past participle

noun + present participle

number + noun

I'll place links to my lessons on adjectives, especially the lesson on the order of adjectives in the video description.

Some put determiners in with adjectives, and while there's overlap with

demonstrative adjectives and possessive adjectives, I think overall the role of determiners is a bit different.

Determiners are less about qualities and

classification and more about specifying what or who we're talking about.

Let's move on to another part of speech: conjunctions.

Conjunctions are connecting words, words that join.

AND is the most common example.

AND belongs to a group known as

coordinating conjunctions.

Without going into too much detail about sentence types,

I'll tell you that coordinating conjunctions allow us to join

two complete ideas together and form a compound sentence.

Coordinating conjunctions are often memorized with the help of an acronym: FANBOYS.

For example:

For now, let's not look at whole sentences let's look at shorter examples.

Correlative conjunctions work in pairs.

If you've watched my lesson on types of clauses, you'll recall another kind of conjunction:

subordinating conjunctions.

These words allow us to form complex sentences where one idea is dependent on another.

You can watch that lesson to review and understand the use of subordinating conjunctions like IF, BECAUSE, and WHEN.

Subordinating conjunctions help form adverb clauses.

You'll have a better understanding of adverb clauses if we first talk about adverbs. That's what we'll do in Part 3.

We'll end here for now, but I'll see you again soon for the final part of our lesson on the parts of speech in English.

Please remember to like this video. As always, thanks for watching and happy studies!

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