Parts of Speech

Words in a sentence can be divided into different parts of speech. Although English may be categorized into more than eight parts of speech, words in a sentence can be classified traditionally into eight parts of speech only for sake of simplicity. They are noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection. However, a word itself can be more than one part of speech.

The function of each part of speech can be summarized as following:

The relationship of each part of speech may be represented by the following figure.

Besides the eight parts of speech, words "a", "an", and "the" in traditional English are called articles which are usually considered as a special type of adjective. But sometimes articles are combined with other demonstratives to form another part of speech called determiner.