8 PARTS OF SPEECH - Noun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb Etc. Basic English Grammar - with Examples

Hi and welcome to this series of lessons on the parts of speech

My name is Ganesh and in this first lesson I'm going to give you a quick

Introduction to the eight parts of speech. In the following lessons we'll

learn more in detail about each part of speech. Before we start just remember if

you have any questions at all you just have to let me know in the comments

section below and I will talk to you there.

OK so first of all what is a part of speech?

Well a part of speech is just the name given to a word based on the job that it

does in a sentence. Think of parts of speech as being kind of like job titles

Just like a person can be a teacher or a doctor or a lawyer - a word can be a

verb, an adjective, a noun etc depending on the job that it does in a sentence

And these can be really useful to learn because when you're studying grammar you

will come across terms like these, you will come across terms like nouns, verbs

and adjectives, and if you know what they mean it can help you to speed up your

study of grammar.

Alright so how many parts of speech are there? There are eight parts of speech

and we start by talking about the verb. We start with the verb because verbs are

probably the most important words in the English language, and that is for two

reasons: first every sentence in English must have a verb - you cannot have

sentences without verbs in English, and the second reason is that only verbs

have tenses. I'm sure you know about past tense, present tense and future tense

That's how we talk about different times and to do that we change the forms of

verbs. So verbs are really important. So what does a verb

do? Well a verb is a word that shows an action or a state - state means a

situation. For example in the sentence "Dylan plays tennis three times a week." In

the sentence the verb is play because that's the action, and we're saying plays

because for he,she and it we say plays - we add the 's' to the verb in the present

tense, so "Dylan plays." In this next sentence "I am a teacher" - can you tell me

which is the verb? The verb is 'am; - that's basically just the verb to be - but we say I am,

you are, he is etc. so "I am a teacher" Now I want you to notice a very

important difference between these two sentences. Notice that in the first

sentence we are talking about a physical action because playing is something that

we do physically. But in the second sentence we are not talking about any

physical action - we're just saying "I am a teacher."

We call that a state, that means a situation. So verbs can show actions or

they can show states or situations.

Those are the two types of verbs

OKthe next part of speech is the noun. A noun is the name given to a person,

place, animal, thing, feeling or idea. For example here's a sentence with a lot of

nouns - "Rosie went to Malta on vacation with her family last year."

Can you identify all the nouns in the sentence?

Well the first noun is Rosie - it's the name of a person. The second noun is Malta

Malta is the name of a place. It's actually a beautiful small little island

country in Europe. Malta is a place. The next noun is vacation. Vacation is the

name given to a type of trip the people take, and the noun after that is family

What's a family? Afamily is a group of people who are related - mothers, fathers,

sons, daughters, brothers, sisters etc. and the last noun in the sentence is year - a

year is just 365 days or the time that it takes the earth to go around the Sun.

Now of course nouns can also be animals like dogs or cats or a noun could be a

thing like watch, pen, t-shirt etc. Or it could be a feeling such as love or anger

Those are all nouns.

What's a pronoun then? A pronoun is a word that replaces a noun - replaces means

it takes the place of a noun. But you might ask - why should a pronoun do that?

Well take a look at this sentence - "Melvin is at the movies with Melvin's

girlfriend."

"Melvin really enjoys spending time with Melvin's girlfriend" Now of course that

sounds really stupid and that is because - can you tell me why? Can you tell me what

the problem is in that sentence?

Well the problem is that we keep repeating Melvin and Melvin's girlfriend

and that is very unnatural - we don't talk like that. And to avoid that kind of

repetition we can use pronouns. So can you tell me where you would use pronouns

in those two sentences? We can say "Melvin is at the movies with his

girlfriend. He really enjoys spending time with her."

There are three pronouns there - his, He and her. Did you get all of those?

OK now i want you to notice that the pronoun 'he' is in the subject position. He

is the subject of the verb enjoy - who enjoys? He enjoys, and the pronoun 'her' is

in the object position. Now to replace a noun in the subject position like Melvin

for example, we use what are called subject pronouns - these are I, you, we, they, he, she,

and it. And to replace a noun in the object position - can you guess what we

use? We use object pronouns - Those are me, you, us, them, him, her, and it. Now there are

other pronouns in English such as his, hers, this, that etc. but we will talk about

them in more detail when we come to the lesson on pronouns. For now just remember

that the pronoun replaces a noun to avoid repetition and to make our speech

sound more natural.

OK the next part of speech is the adjective. An adjective is a word that

gives us information about a noun or a pronoun. Have a look at this sentence

"They drive an amazing big red sports car." Here the noun that we are interested

in is car. So can you identify all the adjectives that give information about

car?

Well if you said amazing, big, red and sports, you are correct because all of

those are adjectives and if you look at them closely you will realize that these

give us answers to questions like What color? What size? What type? etc. The

adjective 'amazing' gives us the answer to the question "What is your opinion of the

car?

If you ask me "What's your opinion of the car?" I will tell you it's amazing. What

size is the car? Tt's big

What's the color? It's red. And what type of car is it?

It's a sports car. OK now that's all great but I don't know if you noticed

There's actually one more adjective in this sentence and that is the word 'an'

Now the words

a, an, and the are called articles in English. And articles are also adjectives

because they give us information about the nouns that come after them. In this

sentence, for example, we know that they drive one car - we know that because we

said an amazing big red sports car.

So remember that adjectives give us information about nouns and pronouns, and

they answer questions like What type? What color? What size etc. OKbut what are

adverbs? Now when I learned grammar in school I was taught that adjectives give

information about nouns and adverbs give information about verbs, and in fact a

lot of teachers still teach it that way. But the thing is that's only half

correct because an adverb can give information about a verb but it can also

give information about an adjective or even another adverb. So these are really

talented words you see - they can do a lot of things. And adverbs usually answer

questions like When? Why? How? In what way? etc.

Llet me show you a sentence so you can see all the different things that

adverbs can do - "Yesterday evening, we walked somewhat slowly in a very

beautiful garden." In this sentence the first adverb is 'yesterday evening' - that

shows us when the action happened.

The action here is 'walk' - that's the verb. There's another adverb

'slowly' and that shows us how the action happened - How did we walk? We walked

slowly. So both 'Yesterday evening' and 'slowly' tell us about the verb 'walk'. But

notice that you can further ask - how slowly did we walk? Did we walk very

slowly or a little slowly? The answer is somewhat slowly. Somewhat means something

like a little. Now notice that somewhat is actually giving us information about

slowly - how slowly? Somewhat slowly. So that's an adverb that gives information

about another adverb, and there's yet another one - 'very'. That adverb is giving

us information about 'beautiful'. 'Beautiful' is an adjective.

OK so you see all the different kinds of things that adverbs can do

Alright the next part of speech is the preposition

Prepositions are words like in, on, at, by, from, with, before and after. And these

words help us to show relationships in time, place and position. For example

here's a common thing that we say to people that we know a lot - "I'll see you

at the office on Monday." There are two prepositions in this sentence - can you

say which those are? The prepositions are at and on. The first preposition 'at' shows

us the place. Where? At the office. And the second proposition 'on' shows us the time

When? On Monday. So that's what prepositions do - they help us to show

relationships in time, place and position. Now students sometimes confuse prepositions

with conjunctions but these are very different. Conjunctions are words

like and, but, or, so and because. And they help to connect ideas - for example in the

sentence "Clara and Jasmine best friends."

Can you say which the conjunction is? The conjunction is 'and' and it helps to

connect Clara and Jasmine both of which are nouns. But conjunctions can even

connect sentences. For example "I didn't go to school today because I don't feel

very well." Here

there are two sentences - we call them clauses. The second clause "I don't feel

very well" is the reason and the first Clause "I didn't go to school today" is

the result. The conjunction here is 'because' and it shows us this reason and

result relationship. notice that we can also say "I don't feel very well today so

I didn't go to school." In that case the conjunction would be 'so'. Alright the last

part of speech that we will look at is the interjection. Interjections are words

that have no real meaning but they help us to show sudden emotion or exclamation.

For example, the interjection

Wow! shows excitement, surprise or amazement. The interjection

Argh! shows frustration or anger. Like if I'm trying to open a jar of cookies or

jar of pickles and I can't open it, I might say Argh! I just can't do it. That shows I'm angry

or I'm frustrated. Some other common interjections are Ouch!

Oops! Hey! and Hi! These last two words are used when we

meet someone or when we want to call out to someone. For example I can say "Hi, how are

you?"

or "Hey John, over here. Look, I'm standing over here!" So I want to call out to John.

Alright so those are the eight parts of speech

Let's do a quick recap of what we've learned today - we started with the verb

The verb is a word that shows an action or state - state means situation. A noun is

a person, place, animal, thing, feeling or idea. A pronoun replaces a noun and we

use pronouns so that our speech is not repetitive and more natural. Adjectives

are words that give us information about nouns or pronouns, and they answer

questions like What kind? How many? What color? What size? etc. Adverbs give us

information about verbs or adjectives or even other adverbs. Prepositions are

words that help us to show relationships in time, place or position. Conjunctions

are words like and, but, because etc. and they help us to connect ideas.

Those can be nouns they can even be verbs and even whole sentences - so you can

connect any two ideas using conjunctions. And finally interjections are words with

no real meaning and they help us to show exclamation

or sudden emotion. Just remember that these are used

more commonly in speech and not so much in

writing. When we write them, we usually put an exclamation mark.

Alright so I hope you enjoyed this lesson.

Remember to subscribe to this channel and I'll see you in the next lesson.