Terms such as “adjective” and “noun” are used to label forms in the language as the parts of speech or word classes. The technical terms used to describe each part of speech are illustrated in the following sentence and simple definitions of each term are listed below.

Nouns are words used to refer to people (boy), objects (backpack), creatures (dog), places (school), qualities (roughness), phenomena (earthquake) and abstract ideas (love) as if they were all “things.”

Articles are words (a, an, the) used with nouns to form noun phrases classifying those “things” (You can have a banana or an apple) or identifying them as already known (I’ll take the apple).

Adjectives are words used, typically with nouns, to provide more information about the things referred to (happy people, large objects, a strange experience).

Verbs are words used to refer to various kinds of actions (go, talk) and states (be, have) involving people and things in events (Jessica is ill and has a sore throat so she can’t talk or go anywhere).

Adverbs are words used, typically with verbs, to provide more information about actions, states and events (slowly, yesterday). Some adverbs (really, very) are also used with adjectives to modify information about things (Really large objects move slowly. I had a very strange experience yesterday).

Prepositions are words (at, in, on, near, with, without) used with nouns in phrases providing information about time (at five o’clock, in the morning), 82 The Study of Language place (on the table, near the window) and other connections (with a knife, without a thought) involving actions and things.

Pronouns are words (she, herself, they, it, you) used in place of noun phrases, typically referring to people and things already known (She talks to herself. They said it belonged to you).

Conjunctions are words (and, but, because, when) used to make connections and indicate relationships between events (Chantel’s husband was so sweet and he helped her a lot because she couldn’t do much when she was pregnant).

Basic definitions of this type are useful for identifying most forms in a language such as English, but they are not completely reliable. A different approach might focus on some other properties of the parts of speech. For example, a noun can be defined as a form that comes after an article (a, the) and can take inflections for possessive (-’s) and plural (-s). Of course, not all nouns (e.g. information, mud) have all these characteristics. Moreover, these characteristics are unlikely to be true of nouns in other languages that we might want to describe. As we shall see, an alternative way of looking at nouns and other parts of speech had to be found in order to carry out structural analysis.