parts of speech english

Parts of speech

Overview

A word’s part of speech is the category it belongs to. Why have categories? Imagine a sentence like this:

Ran tree the squirrel up the.

There’s meaning in it, but it isn’t as clear as it could be. Your mind probably automatically turned it into

The squirrel ran up the tree.

How did it know how to do that? Your mind knows about the categories that words can belong to, and it’s always classifying what it hears, behind the scenes, to make sentences make sense to you. Squinting at the mess that is “Ran tree the squirrel up the,” your mind found two things (tree and squirrel) and one event (ran), and related them using the locator up. This may seem too easy to be worth examining, but when sentences get more complex – or when you tackle a foreign-language sentence – you’ll want a neat set of cabinets to file the words into.

That’s what you’ll get on this page.

There are eight classical parts of speech, groupable into five basic classes:

Noun (and pronoun)
Verb
Modifiers (adjective and adverb)
Particles (preposition and conjunction)
Interjection

Noun

The word noun is an early French version of the Latin nōmen ‘name’. That makes sense: nouns are the names we give to people, places, things, and ideas. There are many ways to classify a noun, but we can start by deciding whether we’re talking about 1) a constant feature of the noun’s identity, or 2) a switch that can be flipped one way or another depending on the sentence the noun is in.

These features are baked into a noun’s identity. They don’t change from sentence to sentence, but stay the same for each noun, regardless of how it’s used:

Common vs. proper

A common noun names a kind of thing: dog, country, planet. A proper noun names a particular instance of a thing: Snoopy, Iceland, Jupiter. Proper nouns stand out in two ways: they’re always capitalized, and they almost never take an article (a or the) in front of them.

Concrete vs. abstract

A concrete noun is one you could perceive through your senses: table, fishtank, iPhone. An abstract noun is imperceptible through the senses, but can be entertained by the mind: friendship, excitement, Christmas.

Count vs. mass

A count noun can be counted as a unit: one table, two tables; one fishtank, two fishtanks. A mass noun cannot be counted without the introduction of a separate unit: bread (a slice of bread), oxygen (a molecule of oxygen), coffee (a cup of coffee).

This distinction, though not made consciously by native speakers, is enormously important to speaking idiomatic English because it governs the usage of articles (a[n] and the). Native speakers of languages without articles struggle famously with them in English, often never mastering them despite getting proficient at every other aspect of the language. The key to using articles correctly lies in knowing whether a noun is countable. Native anglophones can judge an English noun’s countability intuitively, but non-native speakers may have to memorize this information when learning the noun.

Animate vs. inanimate

An animate noun names a creature with a spirit, either a human or animal. An inanimate noun names either a living thing without an obvious spirit (i.e., one that can’t move) or a nonliving thing. English doesn’t make this distinction, but Japanese uses different verbs of existence for animate and inanimate subjects. Korean, usually so like Japanese grammatically, doesn’t distinguish but uses the same verb of existence for animate and inanimate subjects.

Gender

Not necessarily tied to natural sex – the word gender originally just means ‘kind’ – grammatical gender has nonetheless come to be associated with sex because its ‘kinds’ (masculine, feminine, and in some languages neuter) are defined according to sexed nouns. For example, Sp. hermano is masculine because its meaning is ‘brother’, an inherently masculine concept; suelo ‘ground’ is masculine not because of any maleness inherent in the ground, but because it shares the same endings as hermano.

There’s no natural basis for deciding which gender a sexless noun belongs to, only an arbitrary tradition dating as far back as the original Indo-European language. Some languages that used to have gender no longer do (like English, which retains it only in pronouns); other languages (like the East Asian ones) have never had it.

These features are temporary, acting like switches that can have different settings in different environments:

Case

The form a noun takes to mark what syntactic role it’s playing in a sentence. Some examples of cases are the nominative for subjects, genitive for possessives, accusative for direct objects, dative for indirect objects, and vocative for addressees.

English nouns used to be marked for case but no longer are, except for pronouns and the genitive case of nouns (but even this now applies to an entire noun phrase rather than just a noun, as in “the woman standing over there’s car”). Classical Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit are also well known for marking case. Modern languages that still use case include German, Japanese, Korean, and Turkish.

Number

How many there are of a noun. Most languages that bother with number at all (some, like the East Asian languages, do not) have two settings for it, singular and plural.

Proto-Indo-European also had a dual number for exactly two of something. The English words both and between are remnants of the old dual; their plural equivalents are all and among.

Person

When you see the word person, you probably think of a human, as distinct from an animal or inanimate object. But grammatical person refers to a group relative to the person speaking. Person is a switch with three settings: 1st (including the speaker and any others in his group), 2nd (including the listener and any others in his group), and 3rd (including everyone who isn’t in the speaker’s group or the listener’s).

Some languages have two different 1st persons, an “inclusive” one that the listener can belong to and an “exclusive” one that doesn’t extend to the listener. Among substantives, only pronouns can flip this switch to 1st, 2nd, or 3rd; nouns are 3rd person by default.

Pronoun

If Kendall had to use Kendall’s name every time Kendall wanted to mention Kendall, Kendall would lose Kendall’s mind (and Kendall’s audience)! Thanks to pronouns, I don’t have to do that. The word pronoun comes from Latin prō ‘in place of’ + nōmen ‘noun’. A pronoun takes the place of a noun, assuming that the listener can tell which noun is meant.

There are six or seven kinds of pronouns, depending on whether you count the last one:

personal
demonstrative
indefinite
relative
reflexive
intensive
interrogative

All have forms for case, number, gender, and person.

Personal

Personal pronouns stand in for people and things. Here’s a sentence with both:

Jim gave the eraser to Sheila.

Here’s the same sentence with pronouns instead of nouns:

He gave it to her.

Him replaced Jim, it replaced eraser, and her replaced Sheila.

There’s a useful word for the noun that a pronoun replaces: antecedent. The antecedent of him is Jim, the antecedent of it is eraser, and the antecedent of her is Sheila. The word antecedent (L. ante ‘before’ + cēdere ‘go’) literally means ‘going before’. In grammar, a noun usually goes before the pronoun that renames it, since this order tends to be clearer than the other way around. Outside of grammar, antecedent means ‘cause’. This makes sense: a cause, at least in our current understanding of the universe, must go before its effect.

Notice that when we replaced Jim, eraser, and Sheila with pronouns, we didn’t say “Him gave it to she.” Why not? The answer is case. Him and she are not the correct case forms in that sentence; he and her are. Because Jim is a subject (the giver) and Sheila an indirect object (the given-to), we had to replace Jim with a subject pronoun (he) and Sheila with an object pronoun (her).

Here are the personal pronouns in the subject case:

	sing.	pl.
1	I	we
2	you	you
3	he/she/it	they
?	who? what?

? is the unknown person, used when you don’t know which noun you’re pointing at but want to find out. Who is used for people, what for things. Both can be either singular or plural.

Here are the personal pronouns in the object case:

	sing.	pl.
1	me	us
2	you	you
3	him/her/it	them
?	whom? what?

Notice the -m on the end of whom? It’s the same one you see in him and them, and it marks the object case. A lot of students make a big deal about whom, claiming not to know how to use it. If that’s you, I understand why whom seems so strange to you. It’s a zombie pronoun, dead in spoken English and surviving only in writing. But it’s still used in formal writing and fair game on language tests, so you’ll want to know how to use it. Happily, whom is easy. As you can see, it’s just the object form of who. The difference between who and whom is exactly the same as the difference between I and me, he and him, they and them. You CAN tell I from me, can’t you? Then you can tell who from whom! Same thing.

Pronouns can also be used to show ownership. This website is Kendall’s website; it is my website; it is mine. But I’m sharing it with you, so it is also your website; it is yours.

These possessive pronouns my, mine, your, and yours are a bit complicated grammatically. In fact, they belong to two parts of speech at once. They’re still pronouns, since mine = Kendall’s and yours = readers’, but they’re also adjectives, since they modify the noun website.

Moreover, my and mine are two ways of saying the same thing (Kendall’s), as are your and yours (readers’). What’s the difference between my and mine, between your and yours? It has to do with the word’s position in a sentence. This will make more sense once you’ve read about adjectives and syntax, but I’ll go ahead and tell you that my and your are determiners, while mine and yours are complements. Determiners come before, and complements after, the nouns they modify.

Here are the personal pronouns in the possessive case, determiner position:

	sing.	pl.
1	my	our
2	your	your
3	his/her/its	their
?	whose?

Note that whose? refers to both human and non-human nouns. There is no possessive what’s? (though that word does exist as a contraction). Don’t confuse possessive whose? with the contraction who’s? Because -’s makes nouns possessive, it’s natural to expect who’s as the possessive of who, but that isn’t the case. Possessive pronouns never have apostrophes.

Here are the personal pronouns in the possessive case, complement position:

	sing.	pl.
1	mine	ours
2	yours	yours
3	his/hers	theirs
?	whose?

Note the lack of apostrophes in the forms with -s.

The determiner and complement forms of the possessive case weren’t always strictly distinguished. For example, mine was once used in place of my before a noun that started with a vowel: “mine eyes” for “my eyes.” But this wasn’t done out of consideration for sentence position, determiner or complement; it was done just to put a consonant between the vowels in my and eyes, so they’d be easier to pronounce together. Today, we’d rather distinguish the forms than ease the pronunciation, so “my eyes” is standard and “mine eyes” archaic.

Demonstrative

Demonstrative pronouns point to their antecedents. They can function as nouns, as “This is my book,” or as adjectives, as “This book is mine.”

Here are the demonstrative pronouns:

	sing.	pl.
1	this	these
2–3	that	those
?	what? which?

English doesn’t distinguish between 2nd (near) and 3rd (far) person for demonstratives, but many other languages do. In Latin, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean, 2nd-person demonstratives point at people and things near the listener, while 3rd-person demonstratives point at people and things remote from both speaker and listener.

The unknown person comes in two variations, what? and which? The difference is that what asks the listener to identify a noun that has not been said to belong to any particular group, while which asks the listener to choose a noun from a set number of nouns in a previously marked-off group.

Indefinite

There are times when you don’t know exactly which noun you’re referring to, but don’t really care because you don’t need to know. Any noun will do. For those times, there are indefinite pronouns.

Say you want to refer to the members of a group. Depending on how many you want to include, you could say none, few, a few, some, half, a lot, many, most, or all. In the singular, you have any (if one will do, and you don’t care which), each, and every (if you want the whole group at once). If the group has only two members, you could say neither, either, or both. And if the “group” is really more of a squishy, uncountable mass, you could say none, little, a little, some, half, a lot, much, most, or all. All of those indefinite pronouns are handy shortcuts that excuse you from measuring out exactly what you mean.

Some things to watch out for when you use indefinite pronouns:

Countability matters. Many and much mean the same thing, but they aren’t interchangeable: many is for count nouns, much for mass nouns. This is also the difference between little and few, less and fewer, least and fewest, number/quantity and amount. The countable/uncountable distinction is of course difficult for speakers of languages that don’t distinguish countability, such as the East Asian languages, but it has begun to vanish too from spoken English; more and more you hear native anglophones say “amount of people” or “less things.” (The mistake doesn’t happen in the other direction, though. You never hear native speakers say “number of water“ or “fewer air,” though non-native speakers do often say “these stuff.”)

Indefinite pronouns take their number from the OP. This is highly unusual; the object of a preposition in a phrase that describes the subject typically doesn’t affect the number of that subject. “The box of crayons is on the table,” not “are”; because box is singular, it doesn’t matter that crayons is plural. But box is a noun. Indefinite pronouns, being unfixed to any particular noun, have no inherent number and must borrow theirs from the following OP: “Some of the crayons are missing,” “All of the food here is expensive.”

Each and every are singular. Always. These are exceptions to the previous rule. Even when each and every feel plural, seeming to point at a group of things, they actually point at one thing at a time.

Relative

A relative pronoun introduces an adjective clause. It’s called relative because it relates that clause to the noun the clause modifies. Without the relative pronoun, the noun and its modifying clause would be sadly unrelated!

As a noun stand-in, a relative pronoun has to do a job inside the adjective clause. This job can be any job that a noun can do – S, DO, IO, OP, SC, or OC – though S and DO are by far the commonest, followed by OP.

English has four relative pronouns: that, which, who, and whom. Which to use depends on whether the antecedent is human, what job the antecedent is doing in the adjective clause, and whether the adjective clause is essential to identifying its target noun.

Here are the relative pronouns in the subject case:

	restrictive	non-restrictive
human	who	who
non-human	that	which

And here are the relative pronouns in the object case:

	restrictive	non-restrictive
human	whom	whom
non-human	that	which

You see that relative pronouns can be divided into a human pair (who and whom) and a non-human pair (that and which). Confusingly, the difference between the members of one pair is not the same as the difference between the members of the other pair. Who and whom differ in case, while that and which differ in essentiality.

Because inessential clauses and phrases typically get commas around them, you’ll usually see the relative pronoun which after a comma. An exception is the which that serves as OP in a formal, essential adjective clause: “the house in which I grew up.” Because the clause is essential, it has no commas; because it’s formal, it doesn’t dangle the preposition (“the house I grew up in”) but moves it to the front, making possible a commaless RP which.

Though the relative pronoun is the most common way to introduce an adjective clause, it isn’t the only way. Two more are the relative adjective (whose) and relative adverb (when, where, why).

Reflexive & intensive

These two kinds of pronoun share the same forms:

	sing.	pl.
1	myself	ourselves
2	yourself	yourselves
3	himself/herself/itself	themselves

Though sharing the same forms, the two classes do different things. Reflexive pronouns, true to their name (L. re- ‘back’ + flectere ‘bounce’), allow the action in a clause to bounce back onto the subject. If you’ve ever felt like kicking yourself, or like patting yourself on the back, you’re experienced with reflexive pronouns.

A reflexive pronoun may serve as DO, IO, OP, SC, or OC – anything but S – but its antecedent must be the subject of the same clause it’s in. This means that a reflexive pronoun and its antecedent do different jobs in the same clause.

By contrast, an intensive pronoun does the same job as its antecedent, with which it must be in apposition. The pronoun intensifies, or emphasizes, the noun, especially when the noun is surprising. In the sentence

The president herself came to speak at my school.

the intensive pronoun herself heightens the sense of shock that someone so important should come to so ordinary a place. The president herself, can you believe it?

An intensive pronoun can also insist that a noun does something by its own power:

Don’t tell him the answer; he wants to find it himself.

In that sentence, himself doesn’t mean it’s surprising that he should find the answer (he’s as likely to as not), but that he wants to do so by his ability alone, unassisted.

Finally, an intensive pronoun can limit a comment to a certain point of view:

I don’t much care for pop music myself.

This use of the intensive means neither that I’m an unlikely candidate to appreciate pop nor that I (fail to) appreciate it by my own power, but that I wish politely to restrict my dismissal of the genre to myself, leaving you room to enjoy it without fearing my judgment.

Interrogative

Interrogatives aren’t actually a separate class from the other pronoun classes. Rather, the label “interrogative” is a just a way to group together the unknown (?) personal forms of the personal and demonstrative. You’ve met them before, but here they are again:

Personal: who? what? whose?
Demonstrative: what? which?

Why are there no interrogative forms for the other pronoun classes? It wouldn’t make sense for them to exist. An indefinite pronoun explicitly does not care which particular noun it replaces, so it has no use for a form that asks which noun. A relative pronoun needn’t ever ask for an antecedent because it always has one, one or two words to the left. Reflexive and intensive pronouns can’t be used without their antecedents. So none of those classes need, or could even conceivably have, ? forms.