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Unit 3: Parts of Speech: Noun and Pronoun

Here is an example of how it can be helpful to know about the parts of speech. Look at the Notes
sentence: The man surreptitiously entered the room. You probably don’t know the meaning
of the words surreptitiously, but if you know about parts of speech, you will recognize that
it is an adverb and that it tells you something about how the man entered the room. You may
still not understand the exact meaning of the word, but you can understand the whole sentence
better than if you did not know about parts of speech.

When you look up a word in a dictionary, you will find not only the meaning of the word but
also what part of speech it is. This information is very helpful in understanding the full
meaning of the word and knowing how to use it.
The 8 parts of speech that are used to describe English words are:
1. Nouns
2. Verbs
3. Adjectives

4. Adverbs
5. Pronouns
6. Prepositions
7. Conjunctions

8. Articles

3.1 Noun

A noun is a word used to name a person, animal, place, thing, and abstract idea. Nouns are
usually the first words which small children learn. The highlighted words in the
following sentences are all nouns:

Late last year our neighbours bought a goat.
Raman was an opera singer.
The bus inspector looked at all the passengers’ passes.
According to Plutarch, the library at Alexandria was destroyed in 48 B.C.
Philosophy is of little comfort to the starving.
A noun can function in a sentence as a subject, a direct object, an indirect object, a subject
complement, an object complement, an appositive, an adjective or an adverb.

3.2 Noun Gender

Many common nouns, like “engineer” or “teacher,” can refer to men or women. Once, many
English nouns would change form depending on their gender—for example, a man was called
an “author” while a woman was called an “authoress”—but this use of gender-specific nouns is
very rare today. Those that are still used occasionally tend to refer to occupational categories,
as in the following sentences.
David Garrick was a very prominent eighteenth-century actor.
Madhubala was at the height of her career as an actress in the 1950s.

The manager was trying to write a want ad, but he could not decide whether he was advertising
for a “waiter” or a “waitress”.

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