Parts of speech:

The guiding principle in this course is that a word’s part of speech is determined by what role it plays in the sentence. Words that look the same might be different parts of speech depending on what they’re doing.

Noun (N) – Nouns are words that represent people, places, things, and ideas. If you can put ‘the’ in front of it and it’s a complete phrase, a word is definitely a noun. Some nouns don’t allow ‘the’, though. Nouns can be common or proper, singular or plural, and function as part of noun phrases to act as the subject of sentences (though they can also be objects or complements). Nouns can be singular or plural.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun is a pretty good reference as of September 2018.

Examples of nouns: dog, freedom, Kentucky, John, meals, deer, sand, fights, running (in Running is my favorite activity), destruction, group, party

Pronoun (Pro) – Pronouns stand in for noun phrases in syntax. This means that they don’t come along with adjectives or determiners. There are a number of kinds of pronouns—the most familiar ones are personal pronouns like I, you, me, he, she, us, ourselves, we, me, etc. Other pronouns are demonstratives (like this in this is nice or those in those were my favorite). In this class, we’ll consider most of the ‘possessive pronouns’ like my or your to be determiners because they function like determiners. Many question words like who or what, and ‘empty’ words that stand in as subjects of sentences, like it and there in it’s raining or there’s a dog in the house can function as pronouns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronoun is a pretty good reference as of September 2020.

Adjective (Adj) – Adjectives describe nouns. Adjectives usually appear in the noun phrase before a noun and after any determiners. (the hungry dog, five tired students) but can also appear in the predicate after a linking verb (the dog is hungry, five students seem tired.) Adjectives often have comparative or superlative forms (better, best, more careful, most careful). Adjectives do not describe anything that isn’t a noun or pronoun—if a word is describing a verb, another adjective, or an adverb, it’s an adverb instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjective is a pretty good reference as of September 2020.

Determiner (D) – Also known as determinative. Goes with a noun and specifies something about that noun (but doesn’t quite describe it the way an adjective does.) Articles are one type of determiners (a, the, an) but demonstratives (this cat, these shoes) that go with nouns, possessive ‘pronouns’ like my, your, her (with nouns), possessive nouns like ‘Mike’s’ or ‘York College’s’, quantifiers with nouns (many, most, some), numerals with nouns (one cat, seventeen cats, zero cats) and the question word which with a noun are all also determiners. Determiners are always part of noun phrases and come before any adjectives describing the head noun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_determiners is a pretty good reference as of September 2020, but note that we’re considering numerals that go with nouns to be determiners.

Main Verb (V) – This category is also called lexical verbs. These include the ‘action’ verbs but not all indicate actions (other indicate situations or states of being). Every sentence in standard English has to have a main verb, which is the most important word in the predicate (head of the Verb Phrase functioning as the predicate). A sentence with multiple clauses will have one main verb for each clause. The main verb generally indicates the main action, situation, or relationship in the sentence. Main verbs can have different forms, like the past tense, and most of them change form in the 3^rd person singular (I walk but he/she/it walks)

Verbs are a complex topic, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_verbs is a pretty good resource. Remember that auxiliary verbs are considered a different category.

Examples of verbs: hit, been, jammed, running (in she is running), becomes, slept, falling, dies, bring.

Aux Verb (Aux) – Auxiliary verbs or helping verbs are a closed class in English. The modal verbs are can, could, may, might, shall, should, will, would, and must. These are always auxiliary verbs, and never main verbs (except for ‘canning’ or ‘willing’ as verbs, with different meanings). The other auxiliary verbs are forms of be, do, and have, which are words which can sometimes act as main verbs.

Auxiliary verbs are never the only verb in a sentence, so if one of those three words are the only verbs in a sentence, they’re acting as main verbs. More than one auxiliary verb can work together to modify the main verb, like in I might have been shopping yesterday.

Auxiliary verbs are one of the more complex subjects in syntax, but the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_auxiliaries_and_contractions gives a fairly accurate technical definition as of September 2020.

Adverb (Adv) – Adverbs modify (and describe) things that aren’t nouns, from verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs, all the way up to entire sentences. Adverbs are kind of the ‘catch-all’ or ‘garbage heap’ of language, and it’s pretty much impossible to give a concise and complete definition of what an adverb is, because different adjectives have different properties. Some are made from adjectives + ly but not all -ly endings are adverbs (lovely and ugly are adjectives, no adverbs). Adverbs generally answer some questions about the things they modify, like ‘how’, ‘when’, and ‘to what extent.’ Adverbs are the only things that can go between Aux verbs and main verbs, and if something can move around a lot in the sentence without changing the meaning (especially to the front and back of the sentence) then it’s probably an adverb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverb is a pretty good explanation as of September 2020.

Examples of adverbs: yesterday (in yesterday we went to the store) very (in very good) often (in we go to school often), not (in I’m not sorry) and many more.

Preposition (P) – Prepositions express a relationship between (mostly) nouns and noun phrases and other things in language. Again, this is one of the messier categories to define. This is a fairly large but fairly closed class of words, and most of them are short words. They can express relations in real space or time (before, after, to, from, in, out, over, under) or more metaphorical relationships between words (of, for).

Complex prepositions can be multi-word phrases like next to or instead of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preposition_and_postposition deals with adpositions across languages (we call them prepositions in English because they usually come before noun phrases). It’s an OK resource for understanding them as of September 2020.

Particle (P) – Particles are words that usually look like prepositions that actually work as part of main verbs. An example is up in run up a bill at a restaurant. Up here does not indicate a direction but changes the meaning of the verb run. In run up a tree at a park, up is functioning as a preposition, as it doesn’t change the meaning of the verb and relates to the tree. *Note that in this class, we’re going to consider particles a part of the Preposition (P) category, even though they have different functions to some extent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrasal_verb gives an overview of the phenomenon as a whole, but uses a different and more specific definition of ‘particle’ than we are using in this class, as of September 2020.

Coordinating Conjunction (Co) – Also known as coordinators, these words combine two equal categories, like nouns, verbs, noun phrases, verb phrases, or clauses. Coordinators are a closed class that is fairly easy to remember. And, but, and or/nor are the most common coordinators and are always coordinating conjunctions. For, yet, and so can also be coordinators but might be functioning in other categories as well. There are complex coordinators (correlative conjunctions in the Wikipedia articles) that consist of multiple words like ‘as much … as’ and ‘neither … nor’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_(grammar)#Coordinating_conjunctions provides a fairly good overview as of September 2020.

Subordinating Conjunction (Sub) – These words attach a subordinate or dependent clause to a matrix or independent clause. These words are harder to precisely understand until we get to clauses and their relationships. Because and that are some common subordinators, but there’s a longer list as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_(grammar)#Subordinating_conjunctions gives a pretty good overview as of September 2020.

Interjection (Int) – These are words like hello, wow, and yeah, that don’t really participate in syntax. They are not a main focus of the course, as they don’t generally enter into relationships with other words, syntactically.