Part of speech

From Tomísimo

A part of speech is a common designation for a lexical category of a word, also known as word class or lexical class. Words are categorized into their parts of speech based on their syntactic usage or the word's morphology. There are eight common parts of speech, based on traditional English grammar, and they are: noun, verb, adverb, adjective, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, and interjection. These eight traditional categories are rather arbitrary and most linguists recognize that real language can't be categorized that easy.

The parts of speech– verbs, nouns, adjectives and the rest– are categories for words, that divide them up according to their function in a sentence. Verbs talk about actions, nouns refer to things, and adjectives give you details about nouns.

The most important thing I can mention before you dig into the different parts of speech, is that all the tedious grammatical terms don't really mean much. I've used them here to categorize all the material, and you're welcome to use them too, only, and only if they will help you learn. If you aren't comfortable with the terms reflexive pronoun, intransitive verb and polymorphic syntax, just ignore them for now and focus on the example sentences. (Ok, I made up that last one.) You will be able to learn the language by comparing the sample Spanish sentences to the English translation to see how things are put together.