Greater Than the Sum, Part I

A Writer’s Companion to the Component Parts of Our Language

A friend of mine—and avid Shelf Life reader—said to me recently that he had a topic he wanted me to write about, something so basic I might not have thought of it. He was interested to know about the parts of speech and how to use them to create more complex sentences. My friend can speak and read and write, can understand and be understood with no problems, but he told me he wasn’t quite sure how sentences came together a certain way, or why. It wasn’t something that had been explained or taught to him in a satisfactorily absorbable way.

Same thing happened to me with basic mathematics. Some formative concepts were never taught to me in a way I could understand, and I never learned them successfully. I experience dyscalculia and my difficulty understanding math concepts that are childishly simple to others was interpreted as playing dumb to be cute, so nobody ever worked with me on my learning disability and I never learned to do complicated math like long division.

Like my friend, I can do enough to get by. I can grasp some mathematical concepts if they’re distant enough from actual arithmetic, and then use a calculator or a spreadsheet to get meaningful information. Or I can translate a formula well enough to build a basic calculator in Excel. I have a handful of websites bookmarked on every computer that can help me do the most common types of math (this one is my favorite because it expresses calculation types with easy-to-understand sentences). In that way, I’ve managed to be fairly successful at my job and most people don’t realize I can’t add without counting on my fingers.

But when I want to understand or do something more complex, it’s extremely challenging for me because the fundamental building blocks aren’t there. My math church is built upon sand. The same is true of my friend, who expressed to me that he wants to make more complex sentences and use more varied sentence structures in his writing, but he’s not sure how to do that.

Today, the twentieth day of the fourth month, is an important holiday in his culture so I am celebrating and honoring my friend by beginning to write about the parts of speech in English. This is a big topic so I’m going to tell it in two parts, and then I will follow up with an article or short series of articles on how to build complex sentences solid as brick walls and how to avoid common sentence structure bugaboos. 

The Nine Parts of Speech

English has nine parts of speech and every word in the English language falls into at least one of those nine parts. A word with a singular definition will fall into one part of speech, but different uses or definitions for the same word could fall under multiple parts. For instance, the word chip as in “a potato chip” is a noun; and the word chip as in “to chip away at something” is a verb. For the purpose of this article, those are different words though they are spelled the same and have related meanings and origins. 

It’s important to note that the information in this article pertains to English specifically. Not all languages have the same parts of speech. Some languages have more, some languages have fewer. 

Anyway, in English we have nine parts of speech, like we have nine Supreme Court Justices and nine innings in a baseball game and nine Fellows of the Ring (now I think about it, also nine Nazgûl)—I guess English-speaking people just have a strange obsession with the number nine. Anglos are weird and superstitious. Totally inscrutable.

People put these parts in a lot of different orders and group them different ways, but I split them up into two groups: Five primary parts that we use to express definitive information—nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions—and then four helper parts that we use together with the first five to string sentences together—pronouns, conjunctions, articles, and interjections.

Both types are equally important. They’re like two parts of a necklace: You might not wear a plain chain by itself because it’s not expressing anything about your style, but you couldn’t wear the pendant without the chain because nothing would be holding the pendant up.

Listen, none of the above was a linguistics-professor approved explanation of the parts of speech. It’s just how I think of them. Don’t quote me on any of this. If anyone asks you about the parts of speech later, you never met me.

Because I am incapable of explaining anything in a succinct way, I’ll cover four parts today and the remaining five on Thursday.

Nouns

I was taught that nouns are words for a person, place, thing, or idea (or a group of any of those). Anything that’s a thing is a noun, even if you can’t see or touch it—dog is a noun (a thing or a person, depending on who you ask), and so is Mars (a place), and so is freedom (an idea).

Nouns are an open class of words, meaning languages get new nouns all the time. Examples of nouns that have just been recorded for the first time in the Oxford English Dictionary in the past few years include bombogenesis and nanoplastic.

There are several ways to classify or split up nouns. Actually there are a lot of ways—maybe infinite ways—but I’ll cover the two that most affect how you write them down.

Proper v Common

Common nouns refer to nonspecific things or to classes of things, whereas proper nouns refer to a specific (though not necessarily unique), thing. For instance, “cat, dog, horse” are three common nouns, but “Garfield, Lassie, Secretariat” are three proper nouns. 

Madonna, a proper noun, refers to a specific popstar but it can also be used as a proper noun to refer to a specific religious figure—“Madonna” as a proper noun refers to a specific person, but not always to the same specific person. More than one person is “Madonna.” You might also use the term Madonna as a common noun when referring to “a Madonna”—a painting or statue of the religious figure or maybe even a vinyl record made by the popstar—or “Madonnas” to refer to a class of artwork, eg, “the many Madonnas painted during the Renaissance.” 

As a general rule, proper nouns are capitalized while common nouns are not. But, as you can see from the above paragraph, Madonna is capitalized whether you are using it as a proper noun or a common noun. Further, trade names are capitalized even when being used as common nouns. Xerox, for instance, is a trade name, so you would capitalize the word Xerox even when using it as a common noun, as in “please put this stack of Xeroxes in the garbage can,” a sentence probably no one has said out loud in more than fifteen years.

Count v Noncount

A count (or countable) noun is a noun that can exist in singular or plural form and can be modified by a numeral, whereas a noncount (or mass) noun cannot be modified by a numeral or expressed as a plural.

Dollar is an example of a count noun. You can have one dollar, several dollars, a million dollars, even a trillion dollars if you’re Jeff Bezos. Money, on the other hand, is a noncount noun. Money represents an abstract quantity that can’t be counted. You can have more money or less money but you can’t have twelve moneys (except in very specific cases). Likewise, day is a count noun. Each day, every day, some days, other days. 

Time, however, can be either a count noun or a noncount noun depending on context. In the construct “We’re running out of time,” time is a noncount noun and can’t be divided into parts (you can’t say “we only have eight more time left!” although you could say “we only have eight more minutes!”). However, you could say you’ve “ordered DoorDash three times this week” and in that case you are counting a number of times and you also need to eat better.

Two important things to remember with count and noncount nouns are:

1. You can’t have less of a countable noun, you have fewer. So you could say “we have less livestock now than we used to,” but you can’t say “we have less cows than we used to.” You have fewer cows. 

2. Noncount nouns don’t take the articles “a” and “an,” although they can take the article “the.” You could say “a cow,” but you couldn’t say “a livestock.”

Verbs

Verbs are words for actions, occurrences, or states of being:

• Actions—when she graduated from medical school

• Occurrences—she became a doctor

• States of being—and we are very proud of her

Like nouns, verbs can be classed all kinds of different ways but we’ll be looking at just a couple of their important classifications. Also like nouns, verbs are an open class of words and we get new ones all the time—such as to google for information or to onboard a new employee. You didn’t google how to onboard somebody a hundred years ago, no siree. 

Auxiliary Verbs

Auxiliary verbs are sometimes called the “helping verbs” because they usually accompany another verb to adjust its meaning via tense (past, present, future) or aspect (perfect, imperfect), for example. Auxiliary verbs, as a subclass of verbs generally, are a closed group—we never get new ones and there are a small, finite number. I was made to memorize them in grade school and I can still remember the recitation. You can quickly google the full list, but these are words like am, were, been, have, could, and so on.

Without auxiliary verbs you could say “I go to the store” or “I went to the store” but you need helping verbs to add nuance to that phrase.

• “I am going to the store,” expresses the present continuous, meaning you are going in the present time.

• “I will go to the store tomorrow,” expresses the simple future.

• “I was going to the store,” expresses the past progressive.

• “I could have gone to the store,” expresses the past conditional.

• “I really should have gone to the store,” expresses that you are out of Lucky Charms and now it’s one in the morning and you have regrets.

Transitive v Intransitive

Two major flavors of verb are:

• Transitive—verbs that have a direct object in the form of a noun or noun phrase; and 

• Intransitive—verbs that do not have a direct object. Both transitive and intransitive verbs can be followed by more words, but only a transitive verb has the specific type of more words that is a direct object.

Some verbs are always transitive, some verbs are always intransitive, and some verbs can be both.

So let’s take the verb throw. I could say “The boy throws” but that’s not a complete clause. I didn’t tell you what he throws. If I stop talking after “throws,” you’re going to be waiting for more information because that verb requires a direct object—for example, “the boy throws the ball” or “the boy throws his hands up in the air.” In both of those examples, there’s more words coming after the verb but only the italicized one is the direct object. “Ball” and “hands” are the direct objects, while “the,” “his,” and “in the air” are other types of words giving ancillary information about the object. 

Anyway, throw is transitive. It has to have a direct object. Sneeze, on the other hand, is always intransitive. You could say, “Catherine sneezed,” and that’s a complete sentence. You conveyed all the necessary information. Sneeze can never take a direct object. You could say “Catherine sneezed into a tissue” but into a tissue is not a direct object. It is an adpositional phrase, specifically a prepositional phrase—into is a preposition and a tissue is the object of that preposition.

Other verbs, like walk, can be transitive or intransitive depending on how they are used:

• “She walked to school” is intransitive, as “to school” is a preposition phrase and not a direct object.

• “She walked the dog” is transitive, as “dog” is the object of “walked.”

There’s plenty more to know about verbs. I could talk about verbs all day. But you don’t have all day, your time is valuable. Onward.

Adjectives

An adjective is a word that describes a noun (or a noun phrase), giving additional information about it. They mainly describe quantity (all the numbers are adjectives as well as the non-numeral quantifiers: one, seven, many, none, each, every) or quality (words that specify size, shape, color, provenance, and so on: red, striped, old, pretty, French, great, best, tired, hard).

To me, the most interesting thing about adjectives is that when a noun has multiple adjectives describing it, there is a strict ordering hierarchy that they must follow that no native speaker is ever taught and yet we all know. (I have talked about this in Shelf Life before, though I can’t recall exactly when.) 

For instance, quantity must always be expressed before size (you can say there were “two large birds” but not “large two birds”) and size in turn must always come before color (“two large white birds” never “two white large birds”), which must always come before origin (“two large white Canadian birds” but not “two large Canadian white birds”).

Adverbs

I realize by now I’m getting to be a bit overlength and I’m only just getting to adverbs, a subject on which there is a great deal to say. So much, in fact, that I previously wrote an entire article dedicated just to adverbs—largely because so many writers and authors and editors hate them. So I will go over them here briefly, but for in-depth coverage on what I feel is a criminally maligned part of speech, click the link.

The simplest way to think of adverbs is that they are like adjectives, but they’re for describing anything that isn’t a noun. Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, other adverbs, determiners, prepositions, whole clauses, and entire sentences. So when you have a word that is describing something ask yourself: Is the thing being described a noun? If yes, then the describing word is an adjective. If no, then the describing word is an adverb.

So if I say, “this dress is blue” then the noun (dress) is being described by an adjective (blue). If I say “this dress is dark blue” then the adjective (blue) is being modified by an adverb (dark).

Just to make things extra confusing, consider:

That blue is awfully dark.

In the above sentence, the noun is blue and it’s being described by the adjective dark, which in turn is being modified by the adverb awfully.

If today’s article covers any one overarching principle, it’s that many if not most words can function as many different classes and parts of speech depending on context. The main thing to remember is what each part of speech does, not which words belong to what part of speech or what class. Don’t be middle school Catherine hammering a perfectly useless list of auxiliary verbs into her head for no reason except a nun said I had to, and then storing it for thirty more years in the same part of my brain where I have stashed “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” for some reason.

Coming up next, I’ll tackle the remaining five parts of speech: Prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, articles (determiners), and interjections. That’s a ton to unpack in one article but I won’t have to preface it with a lot of explanation about what the article is about and why I’m writing it, since you got that today. Make sure you stop back here Thursday so you don’t miss it! For the time being, I’m off to go lie in my bed like a patient etherized upon a table. Till human voices wake us, good night.

---

If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.

For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.

After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.