Parts of Speech

There are eight main parts of speech: verb, noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection.

Verb: a word that expresses an action or makes a statement

Transitive verbs require a complement, while intransitive verbs do not.

Two main types of verbs are action verbs and linking (state of being) verbs. An action verb is something the subject does. It's something you can see or feel when you read it. If you can substitute "am," is," or "are" for a verb and still have the sentence make sense, it's a linking verb.

A verb can be active or passive. With an active verb, the subject does the action. With the passive verb, it's done to the subject.

Verbs have different tenses. The tense is when something happens. Tense can be present, past, future, present perfect, past perfect, and future perfect.

A verb can have as many as four parts, depending on its tense. You form tenses with a base verb and helping or auxiliary verbs. The base of a verb can have four different forms: present stem, past tense, past participle, and present participle.

English is FULL of irregular verbs--that is, the forms don't follow predictable rules. Look things up in the dictionary if you're not sure of the forms of a verb.

More about verbs here.

Noun: a specific word for a person, a place, a thing, a quality, an action, or a concept. A name for something. A noun has a meaning by itself and can be modified by articles and adjectives. A noun can be in many parts of a sentence: subject, object, predicate nominative.

Pronoun: a stand-in for a noun. There are a number of types: personal, (I, my, me)compound personal (myself), relative (which, that), indefinite relative (whose, whatever), interrogative (who, which, what), demonstrative (this, that), indefinite (many, few, somebody), and reciprocal (each other, one another)

Adjective: a word that modifies a noun or a pronoun (a, an, and the are usually classed as adjectives, as well, though they are articles). It makes the meaning more definite or describes the noun or pronoun.

Adverb: a word that modifies a verb, an adjective, or another adverb.

Preposition: a word that connects a noun or a pronoun to some other word in a sentence. It indicates a relationship, often in time or place.

Conjunction: a word that connects various words and groups of words.

Interjection: an exclamatory word which has no relationship to the rest of the sentence.

I recommend Grammar Bytes! for further reading. http://chompchomp2.com/gbfree/menu.htm