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To form a foundational understanding of English grammar, one must become familiar with the parts of speech found in a sentence. Sentences must always include a subject and a verb, and can be further modified by other parts of speech, which include nouns, adjectives, articles, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions. Nouns, which are used to name people, animals, places, things, qualities, states, and ideas have several main types: common, proper, compound, abstract, and collective nouns. Nouns can be countable, and usable in the plural, or uncountable, and unusable in the plural. Pronouns are a kind of noun used in place of more precise nouns, and can be personal, possessive, reflexive, or relative. Adjectives are used to describe qualities of nouns. They can compare qualities in the comparative and superlative forms. Articles indicate whether a noun is definite, referring to a specific noun, or indefinite, referring to any member of a noun group. Verbs refer to actions or states, and are either transitive or intransitive. Transitive verbs are followed directly by an object, while intransitive verbs cannot be followed by an object. English verbs have four principal forms: base form, past simple, past participle, and present participle. Among these four forms are many irregular verbs which can be difficult for learners of English to memorize. Further complicating the present participle form are gerunds, the -ing form of verbs which are used as nouns in sentences. Auxiliary verbs are verbs which help form tenses or expressions by being used in combination with other verbs. There are only three: do, have, and be, which are subject to the same four principal forms of all verbs. Adverbs provide additional meaning or information to actions, or modify adjectives and other adverbs. The five main types are manner, place, time, degree, and frequency adverbs, although there are also attitude, linking, viewpoint, and adding or limiting adverbs. Prepositions relate nouns with other words in a sentence, and generally can be categorized as time, movement, or place prepositions. Prepositions are often difficult to teach or learn because they lack uniform rules of placement. Conjunctions join words or groups in a sentence, joining words of the same class or separate clauses. As a teacher of English, an understanding of these parts of speech is essential to gain the confidence of one's students and properly explain the functions individual words play in a sentence. It will be much more difficult to get one's students to understand English grammar if one cannot answer specific questions about the parts of speech the rules of grammar involve.
