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Intro to Parts of Speech

Transcript

Introduction to Parts of Speech. So, this first module on parts of speech contains some relatively basic information. If you're very verbally skilled, you may not have to watch every video in this module. In particular, in this video, I'm just gonna be talking about the ideal parts of speech.

Every word in a sentence has a part of speech, a noun, a verb, an adjective. It's actually assumed that you already are somewhat familiar with this idea. In this video, I'm simply gonna provide a brief review. So if you're already very confident that you can tell what's a verb, what's an adjective, what's an adverb, what's a conjunction, that sort of thing, if this is already something very easy to you, you don't need to watch this video at all.

That's all I'm gonna be doing in this video. To review, a noun is a person, place or thing. Nouns serve as the subject of sentences and as the objects of verbs or prepositions. Pronouns are words that substitute for nouns. So for example he, she, it, they, this, that, these, those, who.

Types of pronouns and rules for pronoun usage will be discussed in depth in the Agreement module that's coming up later. Verbs are the action words of a sentence. Every sentence must have at least one verb. So in these sentences, the verb is in purple. She is happy.

Is is the verb. He has read this book before. Has read, that's an example of a two-word verb. Some of the tenses have more than one word because they have auxiliary verbs. Come here, that's an example of a verb in the imperative. Verbs have a variety of forms, infinitive, participles, and gerunds, these and all the, the exotic tenses, these will all be discussed in greater detail in the Verb Form module.

So there's an entire module devoted to verbs, that's how important they are. Adjectives are noun mo, modifiers, descriptive words that add color to a sentence. So for example, all of these are adjectives, all of these could modify some kind of noun. Adverbs are verb modifiers, words that describe the performance of an action of a verb.

Most, but not all, adverbs come from the form adjective plus ly, adding the suffix, ly. So all of these are adverbs that we got by starting with an adjective and adding the ly suffix. And this is the form of many, but not all adverbs. Conjunctions are joining words.

So and, but, or, yet, we're gonna talk about different kinds of conjunctions in more depth later on. Prepositions are very important in English and not easy to define. A preposition comes before a noun to place that noun in some kind of relationship, spatial or temporal, to the rest of the sentence. So the book is on the table, on is the preposition.

The cow jumped over the moon, over is the preposition. Other common prepositions are, in, at, through, by, with, et cetera. These are the prepositions in English. Finally, articles are the words that indicate a particular noun. English has the definite article, the, and the indefinite article, a or and. Now for native speakers, it will be very clear exactly when to use these.

Native speakers use these without even thinking. For folks who are learning English as a second language, this can be very confusing, especially if your native language is one that doesn't use articles at all. I am assuming that you are already comfortable with the use of articles. So all of these are the basic parts of speech.

As a kind of pre-skill for the GMAT sentence correction, it's good to be able to identify each part of speech in a sentence. And I wanna be very clear, the sentence correction is not going to ask you in any way identify the part of speech. The sentence correction in the GMAT is just going to assume, think you already know how to do this.

And in fact, throughout most of these videos, I'm gonna assume that you already know how to do this. So for example, if I give you the sentence, the quick brown fox jumped swiftly over the lazy dog, I assume that you can identify the part of speech of every word in that sentence. The nouns are the words fox and dog.

The verb is the past tense verb jumped. There are three adjectives, quick and brown, modifying fox, and lazy, modifying dog. There's the adverb swiftly describing the action. There's the preposition over, so over the lazy dog is a prepositional phrase. The article the appears twice, once at the beginning and once in the lazy dog, and there are no conjunctions.

So, I assume this is something relatively easy for you. If this is relatively easy, then we are ready to actually talk about sentence correction. If this is really confusing and challenging, it means that you need to study English terms and English parts of speech a little bit more before you'll be ready to start a discussion about GMAT sentence correction.

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