Parts of Speech
Part of speech |
Purpose |
Example |
|---|---|---|
| Adjective | To modify or describe a noun or pronoun. | A recent meteoroid strike has caused significant and irreparable damage to a panel on the James Webb Space Telescope, which has produced the sharpest and deepest images of the early universe to date. |
| Adverb | To modify or qualify an adjective or verb in terms of place, time, circumstance, manner, cause, or degree. | Mesoamerican writing systems share fundamental features that make them functionally and visually distinct from the writing systems of other cultures. |
| Article | To classify a noun as either specific or general. | Nuka Hiva, the largest of the Marquesas Islands, inspired a novel called Typee by the American writer, Herman Melville. |
| Conjunction | To connect clauses and sentences, or words within the same clause. | The Galápagos islands, once the summits of active volcanoes, were heat sterilized and 600 miles from land, but they became home to many unique species including the Galápagos giant tortoise and the marine iguana. |
| Modal | To denote the mood of a verb and indicate ability, possibility, intent, or necessity. | In the future, it may be possible to record and replay our dreams. This could have huge implications for how we see ourselves and others. The potential consequences of dream capturing technologies should always be considered. |
| Noun (common) | To identify a person, place, or object. | Archaeological evidence suggests that Neanderthals exhibited symbolic behaviour by burying their dead and marking graves with offerings such as flowers. |
| Preposition | To express the relationship of a word (noun or pronoun) with another word or element | As of 22 June 2022, there were 5,044 confirmed exoplanets orbiting around stars in other solar systems. |
| Pronoun | To replace a noun that has already been mentioned. | Dabke (Arabic: دبكة) is a folk dance commonly performed at weddings in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan. It combines circle dance and line dance. |
| Proper noun | To identify a particular person, animal, place, country, monument, or title. | In May 2019, Elon Musk launched the first 60 Starlink satellites on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. |
| Verb | To indicate an action, state, or occurrence. | The sandbox tree, native to tropical South America, is one of the world’s most dangerous trees. Its seed capsules explode with a loud bang and launch hard, flattened seeds over distances of around 30 metres at speeds of up to 250km per hour. |
| Verbals | Verbals are words that resemble verbs but function as other parts of speech. | |
| - Gerunds | Gerunds end in -ing and function like nouns. | Reading literally changes your mind. MRI scans have revealed that reading increases brain connectivity, especially in the somatosensory cortex. Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro would take around 103,488 steps and burn around 13,549 calories. (“Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro” is a gerund phrase functioning as the subject of the sentence.) |
| - Participles | Participles often end in -ed or -ing and function like adjectives. | The constructed language of Esperanto has a 28-letter alphabet. Hadza, a dying tribal language of northern Tanzania, is believed by some linguists to resemble humanity’s first ancestral language. |
| - Infinitives | Infinitives consist of the word to and a verb (in its basic form), and they function, among other things, as nouns, adjectives and adverbs. | To read another person’s mind is not strictly possible. (“To read another person’s mind” functions as the noun phrase or subject of the sentence.) The aim of some researchers is to engineer telepathy and enable direct brain-to-brain communication without the intervention of a computer. (“To engineer” functions as an adjective modifying the noun “aim.”) By engineering telepathy, researchers want to improve the lives of those with sensory or speech difficulties. (“To improve” functions like an adverb modifying the verb “want.”) |