Grammatical Terms - what do they mean?

Incase you have not learned a language before, maybe you never had any need to understand exactly what is a verb, noun, adjective etc. If that is the case, I hope this thread will be a useful reference for you insha allah.

The parts of speech

Noun - a noun is a thing. It may be referred to as a "naming word" such as "table" "floor" "banana" "Mohammed" etc

Pronoun - a pronoun is a word that is used in place of a noun. In English they are words such as "he" "she" "we" "it"

Adjective - a "describing word" such as "green" "nice" "old" "interesting"

Verb - a verb is a "doing word" such as "run" "eat" "look" "write". It must be changed slightly depending who is doing the action, like in English we say "I write" but "he writes"

Adverb - a word describing how a word is done, such as "quickly" "efficiently"

Preposition - a word which shows where something is, eg "in" "under"

Equational sentence - a sentence following the pattern of "something is something" [made up of a subject and a predicate: ]

The subject here is basically what the sentence is about. We could say it is the topic of the sentence. When we say "The house is big.", the sentence is telling us something about the house, so the house is known as the subject.

The predicate is simply a word which tells us something about the subject. "Big" in the above sentence is the predicate because it is telling us about the house.

Verbal sentence - a sentence with a verb (doing word) in it. It always has a subject, and usually has an object

Subject - the subject of the verbal sentence is always a noun.The subject is the person or thing that is doing the action eg in the sentence "I saw Sajid", I am the subject.

Object - The object has an action done to it, in the above sentence, Sajid is the object.

Other words derived from verbs

Active Participle - The person who does the action of that verb. If the verb was "write" then the activer participle is "writer"

Passive participle - The thing that has had the action done to it. If the verb was "choose" then the passive participle is "chosen"

Verbal noun - this is a naming word that had its origin in a verb. Often it names a concept rather than a specific thing. An example of this is the word "smoking" in the sentence "Smoking is bad for you."