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Parts of Speech for Grown-Ups

You already know a noun is a person, place, or thing. You already know a verb conveys action or being. You got the whole spiel before high school: adjectives describe things, adverbs describe actions, prepositions show spatial relationships, conjunctions join, and articles point.

That’s a good foundation, but for us it’s too simplistic. Parts of speech are more complicated than that. Adverbs, for example, are a much bigger group than your teacher told you (example: tomorrow is sometimes an adverb). Nouns can function as adjectives (a hat store). Adjectives can function as nouns (the elderly). Prepositions don’t just deal with physical location (example: about). Verb forms can function as adjectives (a used book, an obstructed view, a cooking class). And -ing verbs can be nouns, known as gerunds (Walking is good exercise).

What’s more, many words are part of multiple groups. Than can be a conjunction or a preposition. Well can be an adverb, adjective, or noun. School can be a verb as well as a noun.

To really understand how sentences work, we need to distinguish between word classes and word functions. Think of word classes as clubs. Membership in these clubs is recorded in dictionaries. For example, look up the word paint. You’ll see it’s a noun and a verb. You can buy paint or you can paint your house. It’s not a member of the word class we call adjective. But it can still do an adjective’s job in a paint store.

There’s a special term for this. It’s called an attributive noun. But attributive really just means it’s working as a modifier. And that really just means an adjective or adverb. So paint, we can say, functions adjectivally in a paint store.

So in I bought a can of paint, its function is that of a noun and it’s also a member of the noun word class. But in I went to the paint store, it’s functioning as an adjective even though it’s not officially a member of that word class. That’s the idea behind word classes and word functions.

A fascinating example comes by comparing the words tomorrow and Tuesday. They work exactly the same way.

Tomorrow will be a beautiful day.

Tuesday will be a beautiful day.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

I’ll see you Tuesday.

If you look up tomorrow in Merriam-Webster’s, you’ll see that it’s both a noun and an adverb. (We’ll explain how a non-ly word like this can be an adverb a little later in this book. For now just take it on faith.) But if you look up Tuesday in Merriam-Webster’s, you find something very strange. It’s listed as a noun, but not an adverb.

If they work exactly the same way, how can that be?

The answer points to the essence of word classes. They’re clubs. Noun, verb, and so on are labels that lexicographers apply to words when they feel those words have earned membership in those clubs. It doesn’t mean those words can’t be used as other parts of speech. It just means that they’re not used as those other parts of speech often enough to convince lexicographers they deserve to become members.

That’s what we mean by word class or word category.

It’s important to understand a bit about word classes because they give us insight into a far more important unit of grammar—phrases—and how phrases work as subjects, objects, and other parts of sentences. You need to know a word is a noun to know that it heads up a noun phrase. You need to know a word is a verb to understand its role heading up a verb phrase. And so on. So let’s take a good look at each of the word classes.