How Many Parts of Speech?

How Many Parts Of Speech

Edited By Team Careers360 | Updated on Jul 12, 2023 04:02 PM IST

In grammar, a group of words (or, more broadly,group of lexical items) with similarly related grammatical features is referred to as a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS).
When words are classified as belonging to the same part of speech, they frequently exhibit similar morphological behaviour ( that means they undergo inflection for related properties); similar syntactic behaviour (they play similar roles within the grammatical structure of sentences), and even similar semantic behaviour.

In English, there are 8 parts of speech listed as following: Nouns, Pronouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Adverbs, Prepositions, Conjunctions And Interjections

In contrast to the previous system, modern linguistic classifications frequently draw more precise distinctions using additional terminology such as word class, lexical class, and lexical category.

For them, the phrase excludes those components of speech that are regarded as function words, such pronouns, and instead limits the term "lexical category" to a certain form of syntactic category.The term "form class" is also used, despite having a number of ambiguous definitions.Word classes can be categorised as open or closed; open classes (usually include nouns, verbs, and adjectives) regularly pick up new members, whereas closed classes (such as pronouns and conjunctions) seldom, if ever, do so.

Let’s discuss about different parts of speech in brief.

Types of noun

A noun is a word that typically serves as the name of a particular object or group of objects, such as living things, locations, activities, attributes, states of existence, or ideas.

The word comes from the Latin word “Nmen”, which means "name."
The way that the components of lexical categories (speech parts) interact with other expression types defines these categories. Different noun-syntactic rules apply in various languages.
In English, nouns are words that can function as the head of a noun phrase and can include articles and adverbs of description.As far as we are aware, every language has a division in grammar that resembles a noun-verb distinction.

Example:

The Feline occupied the chair.
Ancient Greek philosopher Plato was well-known.

Types of Pronoun

Pronouns are the words used as a substitute for a noun or noun-phrase, in order to make sentences shorter and simpler, by avoiding repetitive use of bigger noun words.

Pronouns are used for so many varied cross-linguistic functions that some modern theorists dispute the conventional view that they are in the same category as other parts of speech.
"You" is a pronoun that can be used in either the singular or plural form.
Personal and possessive pronouns, reciprocal and reflexive pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, relative and interrogative pronouns, and indefinite pronouns are some of the subtypes.
Pronoun use frequently incorporates anaphora, in which the pronoun's meaning is based on an antecedent. For instance, the pronoun he's meaning in the phrase That poor man looks like he needs a new coat depends on its antecedent, that poor man.

Example:

He is a pronoun that stands in for the noun dog in the phrase, “I love my dog because he is a good boy.”

Types of verbs

Generally speaking, a verb is a term (part of speech) that denotes an action (bring, read, walk, run, learn), an occurrence (happen, become), or a state of being in grammar.

The word verb comes from the Latin verbum, which means "word" (be, exist, stand). The infinitive, with or without the particle to, is the fundamental form in the typical description of English.
Verbs are inflected (changed in form) to denote tense, aspect, mood, and voice in many languages.
A verb may agree with some of its arguments' identity, gender, or number in addition to its subject or object.
The three verb tenses are: present, past, and future. The present tense indicates that an action is in progress, whereas the past tense indicates that it has already been finished.

Example:

Yesterday, I washed the vehicle.
My schoolwork was stolen by a dog.
John is a French and English student.

Types of adjective

An adjective (abbreviated adj.) is a term used to characterise or modify a noun or noun phrase in linguistics. Modifying the information the noun gives, is its semantic purpose.

Adjectives used to be thought of as one of the main parts of speech in the English language, despite the fact that they were typically grouped with nouns.
These days, a number of words that were formerly categorised as adjectives, such as the, this, my, and others, are typically categorised separately, as determiners.

Example:

That's a silly notion.
That notion is amusing.
Tell me a humorous story.

Types of adverb

Adverbs typically modify a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a determiner, a clause, a preposition, or a sentence. Adverbs frequently provide answers to questions like "how," "in what manner," "when," "where," and "to what extent" by expressing things like method, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc.

The adverbial function, which can be performed by adverbs as well as multi-word adverbial phrases and clauses, is one of them.
Adverbs are typically thought of as an element of speech.
Modern linguists observe that the term "adverb" has evolved into a sort of "catch-all" category, used to group words with varied syntactic behaviours that don't necessarily share much in common other than the fact that they don't fall into any of the other categories.

Examples:

She sang very loudly (loudly modifies the verb sang, indicating the manner of singing)
I've left it here (here modifies the verb phrase left it, indicating place)

Types of preposition

A preposition is a word placed before a noun or pronouns to link it with another word. For example, in England, under the table, and of Jane all come before their respective objects.

Prepositions combined with nouns or noun phrases are also used to develop varied number of prepositional phrases.

Examples:

As soon as she saw her father, the girl hurried in his direction.
In order to assist his sister, Jerry plunged into the river.
Priya received the book from Veena.

Types of conjunction

A conjunction, often known by the abbreviations conj or cnj, is a speech unit that joins words, phrases, or clauses while indicating the relationship between the objects joined.

Three basic types of conjunctions are co-ordinating, subordinating and correlating conjunctions.

Examples:

Due to my health, I choose not to go to work today.
She ate the dish even though she didn't enjoy it.
I'm attempting to complete all of the outstanding homework because I'm going tomorrow.

Interjection

A word or term that appears as a stand-alone utterance and indicates an unprompted emotion or response is called an interjection.

It is a broad category that includes many different linguistic constructions, including exclamations (ouch!, wow! ), curses (damn! ), greetings (hello, bye), answer particles (okay, oh!, m-hm, huh? ), hesitation indicators (uh, er, um), and other terms (stop, cool).
Due to its broad range, the interjections category shares some overlap with a few other categories, including profanities, discourse markers, and fillers.
Interjections have been used and discussed linguistically for many centuries in the Greek and Latin Modistae.

Examples: