Word Categories Guide
Parts of speech:
The guiding principle in this course is that a word’s part of speech is
determined by what role it plays in the sentence. Words that look the same
might be different parts of speech depending on what they’re doing.
Noun (N) – Nouns are words that represent people, places, things, and ideas.
If you can put ‘the’ in front of it and it’s a complete phrase, a word is
definitely a noun. Some nouns don’t allow ‘the’, though. Nouns can be
common or proper, singular or plural, and function as part of noun phrases to
act as the subject of sentences (though they can also be objects or
complements). Nouns can be singular or plural.
Examples of nouns: dog, freedom, Kentucky, John, meals, deer, sand, fights,
running (in Running is my favorite activity), destruction, group, party
Pronoun (Pro) – Pronouns stand in for noun phrases in syntax. This means
that they don’t come along with adjectives or determiners. There are a
number of kinds of pronouns—the most familiar ones are personal pronouns
like I, you, me, he, she, us, ourselves, we, me, etc. Other pronouns are
demonstratives (like this in this is nice or those in those were my favorite). In
this class, we’ll consider most of the ‘possessive pronouns’ like my or your to
be determiners because they function like determiners. Many question words
like who or what, and ‘empty’ words that stand in as subjects of sentences,
like it and there in it’s raining or there’s a dog in the house can function as
pronouns.
Adjective (Adj) – Adjectives describe nouns. Adjectives usually appear in
the noun phrase before a noun and after any determiners. (the hungry dog,
five tired students) but can also appear in the predicate after a linking verb
(the dog is hungry, five students seem tired.) Adjectives often have
comparative or superlative forms (better, best, more careful, most careful).
Adjectives do not describe anything that isn’t a noun or pronoun—if a word
is describing a verb, another adjective, or an adverb, it’s an adverb instead.
Determiner (D) – Also known as determinative. Goes with a noun and
specifies something about that noun (but doesn’t quite describe it the way an
adjective does.) Articles are one type of determiners (a, the, an) but
demonstratives (this cat, these shoes) that go with nouns, possessive
‘pronouns’ like my, your, her (with nouns), possessive nouns like ‘Mike’s’ or
‘York College’s’, quantifiers with nouns (many, most, some), numerals with
nouns (one cat, seventeen cats, zero cats) and the question word which with
a noun are all also determiners. Determiners are always part of noun phrases
and come before any adjectives describing the head noun.
Main Verb (V) – This category is also called lexical verbs. These include the
‘action’ verbs but not all indicate actions (other indicate situations or states of
being). Every sentence in standard English has to have a main verb, which is
the most important word in the predicate (head of the Verb Phrase
functioning as the predicate). A sentence with multiple clauses will have one
main verb for each clause. The main verb generally indicates the main action,
situation, or relationship in the sentence. Main verbs can have different
forms, like the past tense, and most of them change form in the 3rd person
singular (I walk but he/she/it walks)
Examples of verbs: hit, been, jammed, running (in she is running), becomes,
slept, falling, dies, bring.
Aux Verb (Aux) – Auxiliary verbs or helping verbs are a closed class in
English. The modal verbs are can, could, may, might, shall, should, will,
would, and must. These are always auxiliary verbs, and never main verbs
(except for ‘canning’ or ‘willing’ as verbs, with different meanings). The
other auxiliary verbs are forms of be, do, and have, which are words which
can sometimes act as main verbs.
Auxiliary verbs are never the only verb in a sentence, so if one of those three
words are the only verbs in a sentence, they’re acting as main verbs. More
than one auxiliary verb can work together to modify the main verb, like in I
might have been shopping yesterday.
Adverb (Adv) – Adverbs modify (and describe) things that aren’t nouns,
from verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs, all the way up to entire sentences.
Adverbs are kind of the ‘catch-all’ or ‘garbage heap’ of language, and it’s
pretty much impossible to give a concise and complete definition of what an
adverb is, because different adjectives have different properties. Some are
made from adjectives + ly but not all -ly endings are adverbs (lovely and ugly
are adjectives, no adverbs). Adverbs generally answer some questions about
the things they modify, like ‘how’, ‘when’, and ‘to what extent.’ Adverbs are
the only things that can go between Aux verbs and main verbs, and if
something can move around a lot in the sentence without changing the
meaning (especially to the front and back of the sentence) then it’s probably
an adverb.
Examples of adverbs: yesterday (in yesterday we went to the store) very (in
very good) often (in we go to school often), not (in I’m not sorry) and many
more.
Preposition (P) – Prepositions express a relationship between (mostly) nouns
and noun phrases and other things in language. Again, this is one of the
messier categories to define. This is a fairly large but fairly closed class of
words, and most of them are short words. They can express relations in real
space or time (before, after, to, from, in, out, over, under) or more
metaphorical relationships between words (of, for).
Complex prepositions can be multi-word phrases like next to or instead of.
Particle (P) – Particles are words that usually look like prepositions that
actually work as part of main verbs. An example is up in run up a bill at a
restaurant. Up here does not indicate a direction but changes the meaning of
the verb run. In run up a tree at a park, up is functioning as a preposition, as
it doesn’t change the meaning of the verb and relates to the tree. *Note that in
this class, we’re going to consider particles a part of the Preposition (P)
category, even though they have different functions to some extent.
Coordinating Conjunction (Co) – Also known as coordinators, these words
combine two equal categories, like nouns, verbs, noun phrases, verb phrases,
or clauses. Coordinators are a closed class that is fairly easy to remember.
And, but, and or/nor are the most common coordinators and are always
coordinating conjunctions. For, yet, and so can also be coordinators but might
be functioning in other categories as well. There are complex coordinators
(correlative conjunctions in the Wikipedia articles) that consist of multiple
words like ‘as much … as’ and ‘neither … nor’
Subordinating Conjunction (Sub) – These words attach a subordinate or
dependent clause to a matrix or independent clause. These words are harder
to precisely understand until we get to clauses and their relationships.
Because and that are some common subordinators, but there’s a longer list as
well.
Interjection (Int) – These are words like hello, wow, and yeah, that don’t
really participate in syntax. They are not a main focus of the course, as they
don’t generally enter into relationships with other words, syntactically.
