ADY-075

Parts of Speech
What is a noun?

A noun can be: a thing, a place, a person, a name, or an idea: teacher, restaurant, White House, and
democracy are all examples of nouns.

Proper nouns are mainly names of locations and people and are capitalized in English:
LondonSony Afghan Queen Victoria Utah

Common nouns are generic things and are not capitalized:

markets parliament clock university intelligence

-Nouns can be concrete or abstract.

Concrete nouns are visible things:

computer telephone car Barack Obama

Abstract nouns are generally ideas, or concepts:

intelligence success moderation Socialism

-Both proper and common nouns can be either abstract or concrete.

Nouns can be singular

shoe library person billboard

or plural
shoes libraries people billboard

Most plural nouns end in ‘s’. These are regular plurals but there can be minor spelling changes
story = stories box = boxes leaf = leaves

The -y to -ies change is the most common.

Some frequently-used nouns have different plural forms known as irregular plurals:
child = children person = people fruit = fruit

EXERCISE 1 Part 1: Highlight the nouns in this text. Then try to identify the types of noun

Big Ben is the nickname for the great bell of the clock at the north-eastern end of the
Palace of Westminster in London, and is often extended to refer to the clock or the clock
tower as well. Big Ben is the largest four-faced chiming clock and the third-tallest free-
standing clock tower in the world. It celebrated its 150th anniversary in May 2009, during
which celebratory events took place. The nearest London Underground station is
Westminster on the Circle, District and Jubilee lines.
ADY-075

Part 2: Put the nouns from the paragraph into the right category

Proper Nouns Improper Nouns

What is a adjective?

In English, adjectives usually precede nouns, except in rare cases for literary effect. You can see that
“reigning” could also be a verb and, in fact, almost any word in English can act as an adjective e.g. the
already mentioned “clock tower” where clock is the adjective before the noun, tower.

Before a noun, you can add several adjectives, often separated by commas:
The young, quick, brown fox jumped over the old, lazy dog.

It is too easy in English to pile on the adjectives (and adverbs) instead of choosing illustrative nouns and
powerful verbs.

EXERCISE 2 In the following text, highlight the adjectives (you should find over ten,
including some compound adjectives).
Big Ben has become a symbol of the United Kingdom and London, particularly in the
visual media. When a television or film maker wishes to indicate a generic location in
Britain, a popular way to do so is to show an image of the clock tower, often with a red
double decker bus or black cab in the foreground. Big Ben is a focus of New Year
celebrations, with radio and TV stations tuning its chimes to welcome the start of the
year.
ADY-075

What is a verb?

Welcome to the easiest part of this worksheet! Here’s a very, very useful rule about verbs:

No sentence is complete without a verb.

In the following sentence we can identify the action as “opened”:

The queen opened the new Palace of Westminster in 1852.

Take a look at a similar sentence:

The queen opens parliament every year.
In the first sentence, the past form of open describes what the queen did in 1852. In the second
sentence, the present form of open describes what the queen does every year.

Here is another version:

xxa
This form of the verb – the present continuous – means Queen Elizabeth is in Parliament, right now,
giving her speech.

These different forms of verbs are known as tenses. As you can see, using different tenses radically
changes meaning, but don’t worry about that for the moment: let’s just focus on recognizing verbs.
Here are two final examples:
i
Other words have now appeared before the verb. Putting “must”, a modal verb, in front of open,
means the queen is obliged to open parliament, as a duty. “Has” combined with opened creates a
tense called the present perfect, which is often used to describe recently completed actions. Many
verbs or verb forms in English are made like this, with modal auxiliary verbs or particles added.

Exercise 3: In the following text, highlight the verbs.

Big Ben has become a symbol of the united Kingdom and London, particularly in the visual media.
When a television or film maker wishes to indicate a generic location in Britain, a popular way to do so
is to show an image of the clock tower, often with a red double decker bus or black cab in the
foreground. Big Ben is a focus of New Year celebrations, with radio and TV stations tuning its chimes to
welcome the start of the year.
ADY-075

What is an adverb?

Now you understand the concept of an adjective describing a noun, adverbs are easy: their main
function is to describe verbs:
The horse ran quickly and the turtle walked slowly.
The queen opened formally the Palace of Westminster in 1852.
Like adjectives, they are very easy to add to your writing, and are easy to make: most of them are just
adjectives with –ly on the end.

Placement of adverbs is also a contentious issue. The general rule is that they follow the verb, but
notice that in the second sentence above, the adverb is before the verb.

Our example about Queen Victoria could be written several ways:

The reigning monarch formally opened the Palace of Westminster in 1852.
The reigning monarch opened formally the Palace of Westminster in 1852.
The reigning monarch opened the Palace of Westminster in 1852, formally.
The reigning monarch opened the Palace of Westminster formally in 1852.

Exercise 4: Highlight the adverbs in this passage about damage to Big Ben. Careful: there
are some words which look like adverbs, but do not act like them.

From 1939, the chimes rang on the quarter hours continuously, but the clock face was
darkened at night to prevent attack by the heavily armed Zeppelins. Though the clock
functioned perfectly during the war and up to 1962, heavy snow and ice that New Year’s
Eve caused the pendulum to abruptly detach from the clockwork to avoid damaging
seriously the sensitively-tuned mechanism. The 1963 New Year was ten minutes late. Not
often silent, the Great Clock shut down for 26 separate days in 1976 and 1977 due to
‘torsional fatigue’; however popular myth has it that the clock got fed up with the
exceptionally hot summer of 1976 and gave itself a holiday too. May 2005 briefly saw a
shut-down, also attributable to hot weather.