Female: Parts of speech are what we call the basic building blocks of language. They are all words or at least made up of words, but they all play different roles in the sentence. The basic parts of speech are...
Male: The verbs.
Female: Verbs express actions. Examples of verbs are: to do, to eat, to be, to think, to sleep, per chance, to dream.
Male: Mmmm... how poetic! The next part of speech is the noun.
Female: A noun is a person, place, thing or idea. For example, a pie, a future, love or death.
Male: Plural nouns are the same as nouns only they’re plural.
Female: Hmmm, brilliant. As in pies, futures, loves, or deaths.
Male: Nouns can be replaced by pronouns. To avoid repeating everything too many times, the language allows you to use substitute words for those you’ve already used.
Female: For example, Youseff the Jordanian chemist can be replaced by the pronoun he and you need not repeat his name again. Other pronouns are she, him, her, it, they, them, those, who, that, me, you, I, their, whom and which. And there are more.
Male: Nouns, pronouns and verbs are the most basic building blocks of the language. They are all you need to make a simple sentence. For example, “The man shoots,” is a complete, if somewhat simple sentence. In order, however, to describe or modify these basic ideas, you need the following parts of speech: adjectives.
Female: Adjectives describe or modify nouns. Modify by the way is just another word for change or describe.
Male: There are countless adjectives but here are just some examples: blue, awful, sunny, shirtless, lazy, moving, upper, 1)acrimonious, sensual, sexy, curvy...
Female: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we get the idea. Next on our list are adverbs.
Male: Adverbs describe the way in which verbs happen. They change or modify the basic verb to fit the many different ways things can happen. For example, to eat becomes something new when you add an adverb like 2)sloppily.
Female: Adverbs can also describe other adverbs and adjectives. For example, “The old man slowly turned a heavenly blue,”but more on those later.
Male: The other part of speech that helps to modify the sentence is the preposition. These are the little words that describe the relationships between things like: across, near, of, at, to, through, under, and about. There are many more prepositions and prepositional phrases and we’ll cover them on recording two.
Female: For now we’re going to cover verbs, and the 3)sneaky way they have of slipping through our verbal fingers.
Male: Hmm, “Slipping through our verbal fingers,” I like that.
Female: Now be nice. Let’s talk about verbs, OK?
Male: Well, as we know, verbs are words that express actions. They are easily the most important part of any sentence. The verb is the one part of the sentence without which one cannot do.
Female: Without which one cannot do? What kind of way is that to speak?
Male: The correct way.
Female: Really?
Male: Yes, really.
Female: I would have said, “That one can 4)do without.”
Male: Well, most people would, however, there are several problems with the way you constructed that phrase.
Female: The biggest problem most people have is making sure that the verbs they have chosen aGREe with the subjects that are doing them.
Male: By way of a quick review, the subject of a verb is that noun or pronoun that is committing the action of the verb. For example, Miss Missy 5)lip syncs beautifully. The verb, the word that expresses an action in that sentence is lip sync. I lip sync. You lip sync. He lip syncs, etc. In its infinitive or unused form it is “To lip sync”.
Female: The subject of the verb, the doer of it, in the above case is Miss Missy. A world-class lip syncer among many dubious lip talents. Now as stated, “Miss Missy lip syncs beautifully” is quite correct. Your ear is probably all you need to tell you that the subject and the verb in that sentence aGREe.
