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In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class [1] or grammatical category [2] [3]) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties.
[9]: 67 For instance, the dash in the previous sentence marks such a disruption. English interjections may exhibit phonological features that are not typical of the language. For example, the interjection uh-oh (IPA:) is a rare case of a glottal stop in dialects of English that otherwise lack such stops. [23]
Schools commonly teach that there are 9 parts of speech in English: noun, verb, article, adjective, preposition, pronoun, adverb, conjunction, and interjection. However, there are clearly many more categories and sub-categories. For nouns, the plural, possessive, and singular forms can be distinguished.
English parts of speech are based on Latin and Greek parts of speech. [40] Some English grammar rules were adopted from Latin, for example John Dryden is thought to have created the rule no sentences can end in a preposition because Latin cannot end sentences in prepositions.
For example, it is possible to utter an interjection like ouch! or bloody hell! on its own, whereas a different part of speech that may seem similar in function and length, such as the conjunction the, cannot be uttered alone (you can not just say the! independently in English). [3] Further distinctions can be made based on function.
A part of speech is provided for most of the words, but part-of-speech categories vary between analyses, and not all possibilities are listed. For example, "I" may be a pronoun or a Roman numeral; "to" may be a preposition or an infinitive marker; "time" may be a noun or a verb. Also, a single spelling can represent more than one root word. For ...
For example, after is a preposition in "he left after the fight" but a conjunction in "he left after they fought". In general, a conjunction is an invariant (non-inflecting) grammatical particle that stands between conjuncts. A conjunction may be placed at the beginning of a sentence, [1] but some superstition about the practice persists. [2]
Nominalization is a process whereby a word that belongs to another part of speech comes to be used as a noun. This can be a way to create new nouns, or to use other words in ways that resemble nouns. In French and Spanish, for example, adjectives frequently act as nouns referring to people who have the characteristics denoted by the adjective.