Parts of Speech Review

     When we are in school we learn the parts of speech and their definitions.  Later, most people can remember things like "A noun is a person, place or thing." or "A verb is an action."  It is all of the other parts of speech that we forget.  It is not until your fourth grader comes home with homework that it all starts to come back to you.  I thought I would do a little review of the definitions of the parts of speech and some other terms we learned in elementary grammar lessons.  In language therapy, if a child is having difficulty with grammar, we will focus on specific areas of weakness.  Some students need to be more descriptive in their writing so we work on adjectives.  Some students have difficulty with irregular plural nouns or verb tense agreement. I will not get into the complications of the language such as when words are sometimes pronouns and sometimes adjectives for example.  Anyone interested in more than the basics can feel free to research this topic. Here is a list of terms with examples. Some you may remember and some may be unfamiliar.

Common Noun: A word used to label a person, place, thing or idea such as ball, home, or happiness.
Proper Noun: Names a particular person, place or thing and is capitalized, such as Bob, Chicago, or  the Declaration of Independence.
Pronoun: A word that takes the place of  one or more nouns such as he, she, it, both, you.
Adjective: A word used to modify a noun or pronoun. It will often be a word that will answer the questions What kind? Which one? How many? or How much?  Examples : tall, last, many.
Article:  The most frequently used adjectives: a, an, the.
Proper Adjective: An adjective formed from a proper noun which will also be capitalized such as:  American flag.
Action Verb: A word that expresses a physical or mental action such as run, or imagine.
Linking Verb:  A word that helps to make a statement by linking the subject and predicate. The most common are the forms of the verb be: am, is , are, was, were, been, be, being, been.  Other common linking verbs are: seem, taste, become.
Helping Verb: A word that accompanies other verbs to make a verb phrase. Some examples are will, have been.  She will walk.  They have been wondering.
Adverb: A word used to modify an adjective, verb or another adverb.  Usually answers questions When? Where? How? and To what extent? Examples: It started here. He threw the ball far.
Preposition: A word that combines with a noun or a pronoun to make a phrase. Examples: in, on, under, from, off, through, against.
Conjunction:  A word that joins words or groups of words. 
      Coordinating Conjunction:  and, but, or, nor, yet
      Correlative Conjunction:  Found in pairs with other words between them: either...or, neither...nor,
             not only...but also.
      Subordinating Conjunction: A word that introduces an adverb clause such as since, as, because, or 
             if .
Interjection: A word that expresses emotion and is not related to other words in the sentence grammatically.  Examples: Oh! Wow! Well,