Parts of Speech

1.0       Definition of Speech

A speech is the expression of or the ability to express thoughts and feelings by articulate sounds or words.  It also means the communication or expression of thoughts in spoken words. It is a skill of uttering articulate sounds or words; i.e. the ability to speak or to use verbalization to communicate. In much simpler words, a speech is a body of an organized set of words or sounds, specially selected to communicate sense. Each of this body of words, a speaker creatively weaves together to produce a meaningful expression, belongs to a different grammatical family.

A speech, therefore, is made up of a body of sentences, while each sentence in a speech is made up of, at least, a clause. Each clause, consequently, is made up of, at least, a phrase or group, as each phrase in a clause is, automatically, made up of, at least, a word and each word, a morpheme.

In this wise, every word, used as a brick to build up a beautiful mansion of speech, is from a grammatical family in English language. These words that, together, make every speech can therefore be traced back to their respective grammatical classes. This enables us to be able to understand the different roles each word plays to help drive home the speaker or writer’s intended point. Simply put, the whole words that make up a speech serve as the components or parts of such speech.

1.1       Part of Speech

The concept, Parts of speech, is therefore, a term in traditional grammar for the nine word-classes, through which words can be classified according to their various functions in English speech. They are:

·         Determiners

·         Nouns

·         Pronouns

·         Verbs

·         Adjectives

·         Adverbs

·         Prepositions

·         Conjunctions

·         Interjections

The above parts of speech can also be called word-classes. It must also be noted that these parts of speech can be further classified into two major groups:

1.      Open-class grammatical items:

Under this we have:

·         Nouns

·         Verbs {lexical/doing verbs only}

·         Adverbs {not all adverbs too}

·         Adjectives

2.      Closed class grammatical items.

Under this we have:

·         Determiners

·         Auxiliary verbs

·         Prepositions

·         Conjunctions

·         Interjections

·         Pronouns

The reason for this classification is best understood under WORD FORMATION as a topic.