Week I: Nouns, Adjectives, and Pronouns — Comprehensive Study Notes

Parts of Speech

Categories words belong to based on syntactic function.

SVO Structure

Subject-Verb-Object word order, typical for analytic languages like English.

Analytic languages

Languages that rely on word order for syntactic information (e.g., English).

Syncretic languages

Languages that rely on word endings for syntactic information, with less critical word order (e.g., Latin).

Eight universally agreed-upon Parts of Speech

Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, articles, conjunctions, prepositions.

Nouns

Naming words ('people, places, things, and ideas'), functioning as subject, complement, or object in a sentence.

Concrete nouns

Nouns that refer to physical things (e.g., firetruck, goat).

Abstract nouns

Nouns that refer to ideas or concepts (e.g., hope, motivation).

Irregular plurals

Nouns that form their plural in ways other than adding -s, -z, or -iz (e.g., sheep "sheep", foot "feet").

Possessive nouns

Nouns showing ownership, often formed with the suffix -'s (e.g., the teacher's chalk).

its vs. it's

'its' is a possessive pronoun; 'it's' is a contraction of 'it is'.

Adjectives

Words that describe a noun (e.g., red, common, difficult).

Postpositive adjectives

Adjectives that appear after the noun they modify (e.g., attorney general, days past, everyone present).

Gradability of Adjectives

The ability of adjectives to show degrees of comparison (absolute, comparative, superlative).

Pronouns

Words that refer to people or things, identified by person and number.

Personal Pronouns

Pronouns that replace nouns, defined by person and number (e.g., I, you, he, she, it, we, they).

Possessive Pronouns

Pronouns that indicate ownership (e.g., my, your, his, her, its, our, their).

Indefinite Pronouns

Pronouns that refer to categories rather than specific people or things (e.g., everyone, someone, nothing).

Demonstrative Pronouns

Pronouns that point to specific nouns, replacing them (e.g., This, That, These, Those).

Demonstrative Adjectives

Words that point to specific nouns, modifying them (e.g., This, That, These, Those).

Relative Pronouns

Pronouns that introduce relative clauses and modify antecedents (e.g., Who/whom, whose, that, which).

Reflexive Pronouns

Pronouns where the subject performs the action on itself; essential to the sentence's meaning (e.g., She hurt herself).

Intensive Pronouns

Pronouns that emphasize the subject; can be removed without changing the sentence's grammar (e.g., I made this dinner myself!).