Greater Than the Sum, Part II

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

I had to cut you off early on Tuesday—more accurately, I had to cut myself off early—because brevity is not my strong suit. I talked way too much about nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. I was hoping to get prepositions in the first half, not going to lie, but I didn’t make it. 

I like to count prepositions with the other four abovementioned parts of speech because they give you specific, unique  information. Then the last four parts of speech not yet mentioned—pronouns, conjunctions, articles/determiners, and interjections—serve additional purposes like clarifying, combining, or creating shortcuts. They still give you information—every word is a piece of information that conveys something to the person who hears it—but they give another type.

I saved more space for the five parts of speech in today’s article because they are not as easy to explain as the first four. Nouns are things, verbs are actions, adjectives describe nouns, adverbs describe anything else besides nouns—so easy.

Prepositions

Prepositions are a class of words that are used to express relationships in space and time, or of ownership or belonging, or some other type of relationship. A preposition together with its object (this can be called a “prepositional object,” the “object of the preposition,” or a “complement”) form a prepositional phrase. A prepositional phrase acts as an adjunct to the clause they are in. Don’t worry I’m going to explain all those words. Before I do, just as an FYI, prepositions are a closed class of words in English. There are a lot of them but we never get new ones. The ones we have are all the ones we’ll ever have.

A clause is a sentence, or a part of a sentence, that contains a subject (usually a noun or noun phrase) and a predicate (usually a verb or verb phrase). So a clause could be as simple as “Jill studied.” We’ll use that. You could have more information (eg, “My friend Jill studied all night”), but you don’t need more for a full sentence. What did Jill do last night? Jill studied. 

An adjunct, in linguistics, is part of a clause that you could remove and still have a structurally sound sentence. In the parenthetical example, “my friend” and “all night” are adjuncts. They give you information, they have a purpose, but they’re not lode-bearing parts of the sentence. The sentence “Jill studied” can stand on its own without them.

To express temporal or spatial or other relational information about the clause “Jill studied,” we need to add a preposition. For example, let’s say I want to tell you where Jill studied. Take the sentence “Jill studied in her bedroom.” “In” is the preposition and “her bedroom” is the object of that preposition. “Bedroom” itself is still a noun. “Her” is still a possessive determiner (more on those later). Together with “in” they form a prepositional phrase that modifies the clause “Jill studied.”

Prepositions can give you a bunch of different relational information. Consider:

• Location: Jill studied in her bedroom.

• Time: Jill studied until three in the morning.

• Opposition or competition: Jill studied against a deadline.

• Capacity or role: As a student, Jill studied all the time.

• Ownership: Jill studied the works of Shakespeare. 

• Participation or arrangement: Jill studied with her classmates. 

Here’s the tricky part with prepositions: Adverbs can also be used to modify entire clauses and express stuff like time and location—and sometimes the same word can act as both a preposition and an adverb. How the heck can you tell the difference between an adverb and a preposition? 

A preposition will always combine with a noun or noun phrase to express a relationship between that noun or noun phrase and the clause that the entire prepositional phrase is modifying. A preposition cannot stand by itself without an object. You can’t say only “Jill studied in” or “Jill studied until.” The preposition must have an object to complete the thought. An adverb, on the other hand, can stand by itself: “Jill studied here” or “Jill studied late.” 

Consider the word “outside,” which can function as either a preposition or an adjective:

• “Jill studied outside school hours”: In this example, outside is a preposition linking the clause “Jill studied” with the noun phrase “school hours” to describe the temporal relationship between those two things: Jill’s studying happened not during school hours but before or after them. 

• “Jill studied outside”: In this example, outside is an adverb that describes where the studying took place. There is no object of “outside” because it is modifying the verb “studied” and not linking Jilly’s studying to something else.

I told you today’s parts of speech were gonna be more complicated than Tuesday’s and I was not joking. One down.

Pronouns

Pronouns are words that stand in as a substitute for a noun or a noun phrase. That’s it, that’s all they are. They can refer to people or other nouns in the first person (I, me), second person (you), or third person (he, she, them, it); they can be singular or plural (we, us); and they fill the same roles in a sentence that nouns do (subject, object).

Pronouns are also used to show possession: “her hat,” for example, or “my thoughts.” Confusingly, possessive pronouns are also determiners (another class of words that are used to tell you whether nouns are general or specific, and if specific, which ones they are—is “that hat” “a hat” or is it “my hat,” for example).

The most critical thing about pronouns is that they must have an antecedent somewhere nearby and that antecedent must agree with them. The antecedent of the pronoun is the noun it’s standing in for. So you couldn’t walk up to your friend and just start referring to me as “she”—“She wrote another great article today, I really appreciate her work, she really helps me learn a lot about grammar.” Your friend will not know who you are talking about. You must introduce the antecedent—in this case, “Catherine”—either before you begin using the pronoun or very shortly thereafter, to make it obvious to whom or to what the pronoun refers. When I say they must agree I mean that a singular pronoun must be used for a singular noun, and a plural for a plural. Bear in mind that “they” can refer to a singular or a plural so be cautious when using to avoid confusion.

Nouns in English don’t necessarily have gender assigned to them like they do in many other languages. French, for instance, has two grammatical genders and every noun in French is either masculine or feminine, while German has three (masculine, feminine, and neuter). But nouns in English can have gender associated with them—“Catherine” used in reference to the person writing this article, for instance, refers to a woman. So pronouns in English very unfortunately in my opinion reflect gender when you are using them to talk about a person. If you know someone to be a woman, then typically you will use “she,” “her,” and “hers” to refer to that person when not using her name, likewise “he,” “him,” and “his” for a man and “they,” “them,” “theirs” for people who are neither men nor women, theoretical people, or groups of people. 

I would like to personally take this opportunity to remind you that you should not guess which pronouns to use for someone based on what they look like.

Conjunctions

Conjunctions are words that connect words, phrases, or clauses together. Conjunctions are a closed class of words so we never get new ones. However, like most of the other parts of speech, there are words that can act as conjunctions in some situations and act as a different part of speech in other situations. Conjunctions come in two basic flavors: Coordinating conjunctions are single words that are used to join two equal clauses together; correlative conjunctions are words that show up in sets or pairs to join phrases or clauses and emphasize the relationship between them.

Coordinating

Coordinating conjunctions join together any two things of equal syntactic importance. For instance:

• We didn’t finish our homework, so we skipped class.

• We didn’t finish our homework, but we went to class anyway.

• We finished our homework and we went to class.

• Finishing homework and going to class are equally skippable components of education, in my experience.

In American English, there are only seven of these total so they’re easy to identify. For the record, they are for, and, but, nor, or, yet, and so—FANBOYs.

Correlative

Correlative conjunctions are super confusing because they are pairs or sets of other types of words that when they appear in certain formations can act as conjunctions. Some of these sets are either/or; not only/but also; and rather/than. For instance:

• We can either finish our homework or go to class.

• We should not only finish our homework but also go to class.

• We would rather finish our homework and submit it online than go to class in person.

It’s important to note that adverbs can also be used in a conjunctive sense to join clauses together, but I’m not including conjunctive adverbs under conjunctions because—they’re adverbs. An example of a conjunctive adverb is “thus” (see also “hence” and “consequently”): “We told the teacher we didn’t finish our homework, thus she won’t expect us in class.” Listen, any word can basically be any type of word if you believe in yourself and give it that old college try.

Articles (Determiners)

I’m putting articles and determiners together. It seemed like a good idea when I started and now I’m not so sure anymore, but having committed to the structure there’s no way to go but through.

Articles are a type of determiner. All articles are determiners, although not all determiners are articles. A lot of determiners also fall under other parts of speech. Together as a class, determiners serve a unified purpose, which is, when speaking of a noun, to tell you which one it is.

Let’s say the noun is dog. I’m talking about dog. Determiners are how you know which dog (or dogs) I’m talking about:

• The dog is outside right now. (In English the is called the definite article. When I use the to describe the dog, I mean a specific one and you know which one I mean because I have already mentioned it or you otherwise already know.)

• A dog is a great animal to keep as a pet. (In English, a [and an for nouns beginning with a vowel sound] is the indefinite article; it’s not definite which dog I am referring to. It’s a nonspecific dog.)

• No dog is a reptile. (This is a negative article; it can be definite or indefinite, but it always means none of the noun in question.)

• This dog right here. (Proximal determiners, this and the plural these, are for describing things in close proximity to the speaker.)

• That dog over there. (Distal determiners, that and its plural those, are for describing things that are distant from the speaker.)

• All dogs go to heaven. (Quantifiers are determiners like all, none, or some that express a nonspecific quantity of noun.)

• Which dogs are Dalmatians, again? (Interrogative determiners like which, what, and whose let you ask about a specific noun.)

• My dog is named Maxine. (Possessive determiners specify ownership of a noun.)

Determiners might also be pronouns (my) or adjectives (some) or articles (the).

Interjections

Last and also least is my personal favorite part of speech, the interjection. This is the part of speech that didn’t fit anywhere else and contains a lot of cool subcategories like greetings, profanities, commands, or sounds that can stand in for any of the above. An interjection occurs on its own (not as part of a sentence or clause) and expresses a feeling or a reaction. The three types of interjection, broadly, are volitive, emotive, and cognitive. All three types can exist as single-word interjections or as multiword interjections (also called interjectional phrases).

Volitive

A volitive interjection expresses a command or directive to the person being addressed, or requests or demands something from them. For instance, “Stop!” or “Quiet!” or “Move!” or “Shut up!” They may not be directly expressed as words related to the command they are giving. For instance, a person could use “Hey!” in an indignant manner as a volitive interjection intended to make the addressee stop what they are doing. They may also be expressions of sounds that we do not think of as real words with their own meaning—such as “Psst!” to get someone’s attention. Look “psst” up in the dictionary. It’s in there as an interjection.

Emotive

An emotive interjection is a word (or phrase) that is uttered to express a sudden emotion in response or reaction to a stimulus. These include things like “Aww!” (when seeing something cute); “Ew!” (when experiencing something disgusting); or “Ouch!” (when experiencing pain). 

Cognitive

Cognitive interjections are words or phrases that are uttered in response or reaction to receiving and understanding information. For instance, when you read or hear something that surprises you—“Wow!” (And, ironically, when you read or hear something that does not surprise you at all—“. . . Wow.”) When you have heard something and you need to think about it more before responding—“Hmm” (also used to indicate that information was conveyed but you didn’t understand or hear it—“Hmm?” or to indicate that you heard information and found it highly suspect “HMM!!”). When you hear information and it shocks you—“Oh my god!”

There’s overlap between emotive and cognitive interjections—emotional and cognitive processes aren’t always fully separate and sometimes you might use an interjection in both an emotive and cognitive way at the same time—for instance, when you witness another person experience pain and say “Ouch!” you are expressing both a sympathetic reaction to the pain of another person and also having a cognitive response, having seen another person’s situation and approximating what your response would be if you experienced the same thing.

Anyway, all this—today’s article and Tuesday’s—goes to show that every word can be any kind of word if you try hard enough, our language is almost completely fluid, and any rule about the parts of speech that someone tells you can be broken. The advice on the parts of speech contained herein is only guidance and not a law. If you see a noun you like and you want to verb it? Verb that noun. 

The people who use a language are its rightful owners and get to decide how to use it. That means the people who are using it “properly” or “correctly” and the people who are using it in off-label ways. Editors and dictionaries and style manuals exist to document what language users are doing in practice. When somebody complains because “they should only be used to describe a plural and never a single person!” or “the dictionary is now using figuratively as an alternative definition for literally!” or some new word got added to the dictionary that they think doesn’t deserve to be in there—ignore that person if you’re feeling kind or laugh at them if you aren’t. They’re not the boss of English, you are.

I have more pedantry like this and I’m going to share it with you soon but in the meantime I hope you are getting out in the beautiful spring weather and getting vaccinated because adults in every US state are now eligible. I don’t usually put photos in Shelf Life but here’s a picture of me getting jabbed. Have a lovely weekend and I’ll catch up with you on Tuesday.

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