How to Match Parts of Speech
- 1). Match nouns to persons, places, or things. A "thing" can be a tangible object, like a pencil, or an abstract concept, like justice. Proper nouns refer to formal descriptions like names of people, cities, countries or books, and they are typically capitalized.
- 2). Match article to words like "a," "an" and "the" that come before a noun or noun phrase in a sentence. In the example, "They wanted a house with a big porch," you see that the article precedes the nouns "house" and "porch."
- 3). Identify pronouns by their function of referring to people. They are related to articles in that they replace articles in a sentence, as in "She decided to go to a movie." "She" is the pronoun; "a" of course is the article. Other pronouns include subject pronouns like "they," "we," "he," etc. and object pronouns such as "you," "him," and "her."
- 4). Pair verbs with words that signify action or a state of being. Verbs are many and varied; "run," "jump," "be" and "feel" are all verbs. Many sentences have multiple verbs or verb phrases, such as "is writing." In the latter example, both "is" and "writing" are verbs.
- 5). Match adjectives with words that describe or modify a noun or pronoun. Sometimes adjectives come before nouns; at other times, they follow a form of the verb "to be."
Consider the example "I am healthy, but I was tired after the run." This example contains two adjectives, "healthy" and "tired."
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