English Grammar/Basic Parts of Speech/Determining Parts of Speech

Determining Parts of Speech

The part of speech of a word can be identified from its form and meaning. The form of a word refers to the ending it takes and what position it takes in a sentence. Form alone gives us a lot of information on the part of speech of a word. It is sometimes useful to look at the meaning of a word when we need to determine the part of speech.

Noun

1. A word is a noun if it takes the subject or object position in a sentence.
2. Countable nouns have two forms, singular and plural. The plural form of most words is marked by the plural ending (s/es/ies).