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Parts of Speech
Nouns
A noun is the name of a (1) person, (2) place, or (3) thing. Nouns are either
proper or common. For example, the name of a person is a proper noun.
So, when we write the name
Tom Smith, it should be capitalized. However,
the word
boy does not require capitalization. It is a common noun.
The name of a specific place, such as New York, requires capitalization.
It is a certain place, and there is only one New York City at that exact
location. However, a location like the mountains is the name of a place,
but there are many mountains, and one must be specific in order to make
this a
proper noun. A thing may describe an infinite number of possibil-
ities; therefore, most things come under the heading of common nouns,
which generally do not need to take a capital letter. These are some good
examples:
car, ship, house, and computer. Note that if we put a specific name
to the noun, we must capitalize it. For example,
Lexus, Titanic, and Alpha
are all good examples of very specific nouns that require capitalization.
So, we see that there are
proper nouns and common nouns. Proper nouns take
capital letters, and common nouns do not.
CHAPTER FOUR:
Parts of Speech
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Ace the TOEFL Essay (TWE)
One must always capitalize Far East, Middle East, Near

N
OTE
:
THE
:
RE
N
OTE
:
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Parts of Speech
EXERCISE 4.1
Exercise 4.1
Directions: Label the nouns in each sentence, indicating
C
for
count
,
NC
for
noncount
,
CM
for
common
, and
P
for
proper

25. Trust is paramount to a good relationship between family
members.
26. Some say that the horse became expendable with the advent
of the modern car.
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Ace the TOEFL Essay (TWE)
27. The germanic languages have similar sentence patterns to
English.
28. He said history is his favorite subject.
29. I said that american history from 1865 to world war I is my
favorite course.
30. Ode to a grecian urn is the name of a poem.
Verbs
Verbs are a little more complicated than most of the other parts of speech.
We will be concerned with several different kinds of verbs here.
Be Verbs
Be verbs are so called because they are conjugations of the verb be. They
include the following: (1) simple present:
is, am, are; (2) simple past: was,
were; (3) simple future: will (be)
We will finish the tenses in the next few pages under “Action Verbs.”
From these three tenses, one can form many different tenses of action.
Tense refers to the time of an occurrence. Let’s look at the be verbs and
the persons that go with them.
Person means the pronoun/name used
with the verb.
Look at the list below and the pronouns used with each.
Simple Simple Simple
Present: Past Future