The three basic parts of speech are nouns, verbs, and adjectives. A noun is a person, place or thing, such as "tree" or "girl." Proper nouns are given names that would typically start with a capital letter, such as "John" or "Parthenon." Abstract nouns refer to intangible concepts, such as "love" or "gratitude." Pronouns are nouns used to take the place of a proper noun, i.e. "he" instead of "John."
Verbs are action words, such as "go" or "speak." Verb endings change based on who or what is doing the action: "I go," "He goes." This is called conjugation. Verbs also change tenses to indicate temporality. For example, "spoke" is the simple past tense of "speak."
Adjectives are descriptive words that are used to provide information about a noun. These words can describe everything from mood--"polite" or "grumpy"--to physical characteristics of a noun, such as its color, shape, or size.
Using these three parts of speech, one can create a myriad of simple English sentences.
Articles are a part of speech, always used with a noun, that add specification to that noun. Common articles are "a," which becomes "an" when preceding a noun that begins in a vowel, and "the." "A" is known as an indefinite article, meaning it can be paired with any general noun. In the sentence, "John throws a ball," the ball can be any ball, not a specific one. "The," by contrast, is known as the definite article, referring to a particular noun, not a general noun. In the sentence, "John throws the ball," "the" indicates a specific ball.
More complex parts of speech include adverbs, conjunctions and prepositions, which add complexity and depth of meaning to sentences. Adverbs modify verbs, which means they provide more information about a verb. Many adverbs end in "-ly." In the sentence, "John carefully throws the ball," the adverb "carefully" lets us know how John is throwing the ball. "Forcefully," "angrily," "easily," are all adverbs that could take the place of "carefully" and change the meaning of the sentence. Conjunctions are words that join or separate nouns and clauses, like "and," "but," "therefore" and "or." Prepositions indicate the relationship of one noun to another. These can generally be thought of as location words, like "by," "near," "on," "under" or "in."
The most basic sentence structure in the English language is subject-verb-object. Subjects and objects are usually nouns. The subject is the thing doing the action, and the object is the thing to which the action is being done. This relationship is best described through an example:
In the sentence, "John visits the beach," "John" is the subject--a proper noun. "Visits" is the verb, and "beach" is the object. This order is essential to the sentence's meaning--"The beach visits John" has all the same words, but swapping the subject and object completely changes the meaning.
Punctuation is used in written English to break up sentences, create contractions and indicate possessives, and denote quotations within a sentence. The most common forms of punctuation:
Periods (.), exclamation points (!), and question marks (?) all end sentences.
Commas (,), semicolons (;), and colons (:) indicate pauses in a sentence and can be followed by dependent or independent clauses.
Quotation marks (") indicate a quote, when someone else's words are being used in a sentence.
Lastly, apostrophes (') are used to indicate the possessive and are also used in the place of missing letters in a contraction. For example, "isn't" is a contraction meaning "is not." The apostrophe takes the place of the "o" in "not."