Words

Syntax deals with the question of how the phrases of a language are built up from smaller phrases and words.

Parts of Speech

Every English word belongs to a part of speech like noun, verb, or adjective, and many words belong to more than one (for instance, the word cook can be a noun or a verb). You can think of a part of speech as a set of words that share some grammatical property, e.g. nouns often refer to objects and can be singular or plural, verbs often refer to event and can appear with different tense affixes, etc.

Thus, for every part of speech, there are a number of tests that one can use to check whether a given word belongs to that part of speech. While there are certain cases where the tests to not give a clear result on the part of speech of a word, the typical situation is one where the tests unambiguously favor one part of speech over the others.

The parts of speech can be grouped into two classes:

1. Major parts of speech
2. Minor parts of speech

Exercises on Parts of Speech