If
you ask someone what part of speech a given word is, they cannot answer
without knowing some context for the word. A word, such as running
–
that is the word found in the dictionary and spelt
r-u-n-n-i-n-g –
can have many functions in a sentence. For instance:
The running
man was late for work. (adjective) Running
is good for the body. (noun)
I was running
for the bus when I saw her. (present participle)
Even dyed in the wool conjunctions such as and can function in
a sentence as a different part of speech. In the sentence below, it
functions as a noun:
The word, and,
is a conjunction.
In addition, different authorities might differ on the part of speech
of a word in a sentence. For instance:
My
cat is meowing.
Here, the word, my,
could be:
a personal pronoun
a possessive pronoun
an adjective
a determiner
Fortunately,
it is all of these. And naming the part of speech does not matter. At
least, it doesn't matter as much as our being able to figure out the
functions of a word in a sentence, and understand how it works in that
sentence. However, in modern grammar we might not call my an adjective,
although it is an adjective in traditional grammar (and it still
modifies the word cat).
