Kinds and Functions of Words: Word Classes or Parts of Speech

Every statement is a combination of words, and every statement says something to communicate information. The simplest possible kind of statement - for example, Dogs bark - has two kinds of words in it. It has a what word, dogs, and a what happens word, bark. These kinds of words are the most basic parts of any statement. If a person only says dog, no statement is made, and no information is conveyed. A sound is made that calls to mind a common, four-footed animal, but nothing regarding it is learned.
The what words are called nouns. They tell what is being talked about. They are identifying words, or names. Nouns identify persons, places, or things. They may be particular persons, places, or things: Michael Jackson, Reykjavik, World Trade Center. Or they may be general nouns: singer, town, building. Concrete nouns indicate things that can be seen such as car, teapot, and potato. Abstract nouns denote concepts such as love, honesty,and beauty.
It is rather odd that English grammar should retain this abstract-concrete distinction for nouns. It appears to be a survival from the philosopher Plato, who divided the world into mind and matter. If it has any value it is in the philosophical field of epistemology (theory of knowledge). It does not really reveal anything for linguists beyond itself. That is, we can, if we wish, try to place nouns in the sub-categories of concrete and abstract, but once we have done so, this categorization has no further value for the study of language. Moreover, modern science confuses the issue, since it shows that many things we once supposed to belong to mind, are in fact, embodied in matter. A thrill is not only abstract, since it involves matter at the level of biochemistry.

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The what happens words are called verbs. They are the action words in a statement. Without them it is impossible to put sentences together. It is the verb that says something about the noun: dogs bark, birds fly, fish swim. Verbs are the important words that create information in statements. Although nouns alone make no statement, verbs can occasionally do so. Help! gives the information that someone is in trouble, and Go away! tells someone or something emphatically to leave.
Besides nouns and verbs there are other kinds of words that have different functions in statements. They are pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, articles, prepositions, and a very few words that can be called function words because they fit into none of the other categories. All of these kinds of words together are called parts of speech. They can just as well be called parts of writing because they apply to written as well as to spoken language.

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Nouns and articles

Nouns can be particular or general: the house, a house. The words the and a are articles, or, in more technical terms, determiners. A house can be any house, but the house is a quite definite building. When a noun begins with a vowel (a, e, i, o, u, and, occasionally, y) the indefinite article a becomes an for the sake of easier pronunciation - an apple, an elephant, an orange. Sometimes an is used before words that start with h, especially if the h is silent: an honorary degree. If the h is sounded a is the standard form: an 'otel, a hotel.
Nouns can be singular or plural in number: cat, cats.

• In some cases es is added to make nouns plural: dress, dresses.
• Some nouns change their forms in the plural, without adding an s but by changing or mutating a vowel: foot, feet; man, men; mouse, mice; goose, geese.
• Some nouns do not change at all in the plural: sheep, fowl.

There are also group nouns, called noun phrases. This means that two or more nouns, or a noun and an adjective, are put together to form what amounts to, or works like, one noun: football stadium, rock concert, orange tree. In each case certain nouns - football, rock, orange - are attached to other nouns, and each modifies or describes the second noun in some way to convey a different kind of object. A football and a football stadium are two entirely different things, though they both have to do with the same game.
Some nouns are one-of-a-kind names: Suez Canal, Elvis Presley, Empire State Building. Also called proper nouns, they are capitalized to set them off from general nouns. Sometimes adjectives (words that describe nouns) are also capitalized. This normally happens when the adjective is made from a proper noun, especially a place or person: American literature, English countryside, Elizabethan theatre.

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Proper nouns are contrasted with common nouns (naming words for general classes of things which contain many individual examples). In fact many of the nouns that we consider proper are still names for more than one individual, as with the name of a model of car (like Ford Escort or VW Beetle, which might have been produced in the millions). Like the abstract-concrete distinction, the common-proper categories may originate in Platonic philosophy, which contrasted the many things in the real world with unique ideal originals of which they are imperfect copies. It is of more practical concern, since it is meant to inform the written representations of words (whether or not to use an initial capital). Unlike German (which uses a capital for all nouns) or Norwegian (which never does), English has a mixed and inconsistent system which changes over time, and which is confused by the individual tendencies of writers. One problem is that a descriptive phrase (like the second world war) can become petrified into a title, so that we write Second World War or World War Two. And Queen Juliana is or was the queen of the Netherlands, but Queen Elizabeth II is, to many of her subjects, simply the Queen, or even The Queen. In these cases, the "correct" forms are not universally standard for all writers of English, but more a matter of publishers' house styles.
Many introductions to English grammar for schoolchildren are to blame for presenting this common-proper distinction as if it were very straightforward - by referring only to well-behaved kinds of proper noun, such as personal names or the names of cities, rivers and planets. In such introductions the distinction is introduced chiefly to lead onto instruction about the use of capital letters in writing such nouns.
Nouns are used in different ways: The dog barks. The man bit the dog. In the first case, dog is the actor, or the one that initiates the action of the verb. In the second, dog is acted upon. In The dog barks, dog is the subject of the verb. In the other sentence, dog is the object of the verb.
Sometimes a noun is the indirect object of a verb: He gave the dog a bone. Bone is the direct object; it is what was given. Because it was given to the dog, dog is considered the indirect object of the action.

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Nouns can also be objects of prepositions - words like to, in, for, and by - so the above sentence could read: He gave a bone to the dog. The words to the dog are called a prepositional phrase.
Some verb forms take nouns as objects: Drinking milk is good for you. In this sentence, milk is the object of the verbal form drinking. Such a combination of verb and noun is called a verbal phrase.
Nouns can show possession: The dog's collar is on the table. The collar is possessed, or owned, by the dog. All possession does not indicate ownership, however. In The building's roof is black, the roof is on, but not owned by, the building. Adding an apostrophe and an s to a noun shows possession ('): the cat's tongue, the woman's purse. If the noun is plural or already has an s, then often only an apostrophe need be added: the mothers' union (that is, a union of many mothers). The word of may also be used to show possession: the top of the house, the light of the candle, the Duke of Wellington.