Starting Out:

Learning the Basics

Names of the words that make up a sentence.

In studying English, we must learn to identify the names of the most important parts of the
language and their functions: the noun, the verb, the pronoun, the adjective, the adverb, the preposition,
the conjunction and the interjection. These parts are used regularly in communications in English. A short
explanation and a some examples are given to help you understand them.

Noun;
The name of a person, place, thing, thought or an idea.

Examples: England, football, mountain, pepper, car, paper, King Carlos.

Top Tip; You can identify a noun in a sentence by asking who or what is the sentence about or who or what
is the action being done to. You can place the word “The” in front of a noun.

Verb;
An action word. A verb describes something happening.
Examples: Fly, run, sleep, play, eat, buy.
Top Tip; By placing “To” in front of a verb, you make “The Infintive” form of the verb. This helps confirm
the word is in fact a verb.

Pronoun;
A word that is used to take the place of a noun. This is done to stop the writer (and
the reader) having to repeat the same word over and over.
Examples: I, they, their, ourselves, itself, your, my, we.

Adjective;
An adjective is a word that helps describe a noun.
Examples: big, little, white, beautiful, old, green, fast

Adverb;
An adverb helps the verb in a sentence. It tells you when, where or how the action
happens.
Examples: badly, well, quietly, early, always, dearly, earnestly.
Top Tip; Most, but not all, adverbs end in “ly”.
 Preposition;

A preposition is a word that indicates the relationship between a noun (or pronoun)
and another word in the same sentence. This relationship is based on time (when) or position
(where) and manner.

Examples: after, under, beyond, across, toward, before, until.

Conjunction;
A conjunction is a word which joins two parts of a sentence together
Examples: and, because, for, since, although, if, unless, so that, therefore.

Interjection;
An interjection is a word which is used to portray human emotions such as surprise or pain.
Examples: ouch, oh, I say, wow, O my God.
Top Tip; We sometimes use an exclamation mark (!) when we want to stress an interjection.

The English language, like most other languages, has exceptions to nearly every rule and some
words do not fit into a category as easily as you first might think. We did say that “play” is a verb and to
prove it we can see that the phrase “to play” makes sense. However, “the play” also makes sense so
“play” can be a noun or a verb! If we add some letters to the end of the word we come up with “playful”.
This is an adjective as it helps in describing the noun as in “The playful dog”. Add some more and we
have playfully. This is an adverb and is used here to tell us how the dog acted; “The dog acted playfully”.
This might seem very confusing at the moment, but I assure you that a desire to learn is all you need to
see you through.