Lesson 1: Parts of Speech – The building blocks of a sentence

Have you ever seen the construction of a house? Have you noticed what materials are used for it and how? 

Yes, I know what you would say, “Bricks, sand, cement, stone chips, wood and iron beams for structure, plasters and putties, nuts and bolts, frames etc. etc.” You put together these materials: concrete for the foundations or base, bricks for the walls, window frames to make the windows, and door frames to make the doorways, use cement, nails, nuts and bolts, plasters and putties to join them all together properly at the right places in the right way and you get a beautiful house constructed and standing in front of you.

Image courtesy: Classroom Clipart

Now you must be wondering why I asked you such a question. Well, my friend, writing a nice composition is just like constructing a beautiful house. Each of the materials used to build a house has specific functions. You do not put a window frame in place of a door frame and use the window frame to go in and out of the house.

Similarly, you put the right words in the right places and you “construct” a beautiful grammatically correct sentence. Put together these sentences in the right order and you get a nice composition. 

Consider the following sentence:

"water a glass of want I."

Can you make out the meaning of this sentence? No. Why? Because you have not put the right words in the right places and "constructed" it correctly. 


What if I say : "I want a glass of water." The sentence is now meaningful.

Q. So what are the right places and right words that go with a sentence building? 

Let us see.

A sentence is made up of different kinds of words, phrases and clauses. All these words in English language can be put, according to the work they do, into eight boxes. These boxes are known as the Parts of Speech. When you put words from these boxes in the right order, you get different types of sentences. But before we talk about sentences and their types, let us open these boxes one by one, and see what they contain.

The Eight Boxes of Parts of Speech

1. Nouns – The naming words

2. Pronouns – The words that stand for nouns
3. Adjectives – The words which describe nouns
4. Verbs – About actions and state
5. Adverbs – The words which describe verbs and adjectives
6. Prepositions – Words showing relation with other words in a sentence
7. Conjunctions - The joining words
8. Interjections - The words that express feelings

We will now pick up one box after another and try to explore what is inside each of them.

Please note

• The Parts of Speech in a sentence act like the building blocks of a sentence, just like the bricks and cement in the construction of a house.

• Some English Grammar Books consider The Determiners as a Parts of Speech unit but in TUTORTRIX we will consider it as a separate unit. 

Exercise 1 (Level: Easy): Parts of Speech

Next lesson: Lesson 2: Nouns - The naming words.