parts of speech

parts of speech

The Importance of Understanding Parts of Speech

1. Introduction

Grammar usually identifies the syntax and the morphology of the language. The syntax is closely related to the sentence structure. Parts of the statement are to be arranged systematically in order to produce a good grammatical sentence. Any disarrangement of words will cause confusion, misunderstanding or misinterpretation. While the morphology is the inflection of the word. The words need to be changed in any occasion, so that it will convey the word meaning, noun, adjective, adverb and verb limit. Changes in the word are divided into two, they are the addition of affix and reduplication. When one understands grammar, they’ll also understand the changes of the word, and its sentence structure. Parts of speech are the important elements or “ingredients” in constructing a correct sentence. Understanding its concept and function will be quite helpful to fix the error that occurs in a sentence.

From the day language is imparted in one’s career, grammar is necessary. In general, grammar is a set of rules. It consists of the syntax, the word formation and arrangement – its morphology, and the word changes.

2. Nouns

Nouns are words representing people, places, things, activities, or concepts. Linguists have traditionally defined a noun as a person, place, thing, or idea. A proponent of this view is R.J. Pittner (1977), who states that nouns refer to a wide variety of semantic content but are usually best defined by the semantic relations into which they enter. This definition has a fair bit of truth to it, but often discrepancies arise as to what actually constitutes a “person, place, thing, or idea.” This is especially true when researching languages of other cultures, which may have concepts not found in the culture of the researcher. Other types of nouns have been discussed in more recent years; Sakshi Bhatia (2006) states that nouns also include words that represent activities. At the heart of such discrepancies is the fact that it is difficult to come up with a definition of a noun that applies to every instance found in every natural language. Noun is, of course, a universal grammar category, but it may have different criteria for inclusion in each language. Nouns are often categorized further in more specific terms, such as common, proper, and concrete, to name a few. Pittner (1977) explains that there are quite a few morphological criteria on which nouns are categorized, but few of them hold true for all nouns and therefore do not give a clear picture of what constitutes a given type. One example of this is classifying nouns that are the names of people and require the criterion of names that end in a certain suffix. This criterion is unlikely to hold true in Latin-based languages where different suffixes are used and may not be useful in languages such as Japanese that have no dictionary-level suffixes on names. This is an unproductive endeavor in defining noun types at this time but may be more viable in the future as linguistic research provides a clearer picture of what exactly a universal category of noun.

3. Verbs

Verbs are of vital importance in constructing sentences. Indeed, the sentence cannot begin without a verb. This can sometimes be the case in imperatives such as “Go!” or questions such as “How are you?”. Verbs always have a subject, meaning the action is done by someone or something. The part of the sentence that goes with the verb is called the subject complement, which is often confused with the direct object. This is because the action is often done to someone or something. For example, “he hit the ball”. “He” is the subject and the action is “hit the ball”, so the ball must be the complement, which is actually the direct object. To distinguish between the two, it is useful to remember that not every verb has a direct object, but it will always have a subject. A direct object, however, is only present when an action is done to someone or something and it denotes the receiver of the result. For example, “he took a shower”. A shower is the thing being taken, so it is the direct object. An action can be done to the subject or the subject can do it to something else. This is called the transitivity of the verb. For example, “he ran”, “he ran the race”. In the first sentence, the action is done by the subject to himself. In the second sentence, the action is done to the race. So, in the first sentence, the verb is intransitive and in the second, it is transitive. Once it is clear what the verb and subject are, a sentence can be built around them. A correct verb is automatically chosen by someone who has been brought up with English as their first language. When a foreign student learns English, it is often a case of trial and error or learning from previous mistakes. People from other countries often encounter problems with irregular verbs, tenses, and endings.

Verbs are the only part of speech that conveys an action. In writing or even speech, the action and meaning can be made clear by using a verb, whether it be physical or mental. Verbs also have forms which indicate time: past, present, future, present participle, past participle, and infinitive. In essence, verbs are vitally important because they are the backbone of a sentence. Without them, the sentence will not make sense or have meaning.

4. Adjectives and Adverbs

With adverbs, the comparison is linked with the second action being compared to the first. An adverb would be used to show how a verb is done better or worse, more or less. In the following example, the -er comparatives are formed when adding -er on the end of the adverb, and -est is formed by adding -est to the adverb. More and less can also be used.

An adjective would be used to compare a noun with another noun. It would be written in the following form: Noun (adjective and noun) as has been shown in the two examples. I am a long-distance runner. He is a tougher rugby player.

An adjective is a word that describes or modifies a noun or a pronoun. An adverb is usually defined as a word that gives us more information about a verb. In the following sentence, quickly is an adverb as it tells us more about the verb ‘ran’. Adjectives and adverbs are the two kinds of modifiers. Both adjectives and adverbs can be used to compare information between two things or two actions. This is known as the comparative.

5. Conclusion

Thus, it is important for people to understand and learn about the various parts of speech. This statement that I provided in the introductory paragraph only states that people, taking English should learn about it. Why is it important to learn about them? Let’s ask ourselves. Would we be able to construct a house without the knowledge of the types of materials available to us? Would we bake a cake without knowing what ingredients are to be used and the amount of each needed? In same way, how can we expect to construct a grammatically correct sentence, or write and punctuate a sentence properly without knowing the different parts of speech? Like the building of a house, or the cooking of a cake require certain materials and ingredients, writing similarly, has its own set of “ingredients” that makes a good or bad sentence. Improper use of parts of speech can many a times result in a miscommunication. An example of this can be seen with the sentence “I saw that she was sad when her cat died” as compared to “I saw that she was sad her cat died”. Both sentences basically have the same meaning, but by using different parts of speech, the emphasis of the sentence has changed. In the first sentence, the use of the word “when” as an adverb conjunction lets us know her cat died at the same time she was sad. The second sentence, by using “her cat died” as a noun clause, implies she is still sad because her cat had died, not specifically mentioning whether it was at the time when the speaker saw her.