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For Students:

Writing, Reading, Listening & Speaking:

Learning the Vocabulary of English

Changing Parts of Speech

In the preceding exercise you have learned a number of the most common suffixes in

English. Notice that a suffix usually changes a word from one part of speech to

another. You can frequently tell the part of speech by its form, in contrast to

another form of the same word. For example, imagine (verb),imagination (noun),

imaginative (adjective), and imaginatively (adverb). We do not have to know the

meaning of this word in order to recognize these parts of speech. In the nonsense

sentence, Tashism vipped prodoption bortly, we can be fairly sure what part of speech

each word is. We do not know this because the nouns are names of persons, places, or

things, or because the verb describes an action or state of being. We have no idea of

the meaning of these words. But we do recognize characteristic forms: -ism and -tion

as noun endings, -ed as a verb ending, -ly as an adverb ending.

You can improve your vocabulary by learning some of these common suffixes and how

they change words from one part of speech to another.

Present and Past Participles as Adjectives

One familiar way to change a verb into an adjective is to use the present participle

(the -ing ending) or the past participle (the -ed ending). For example:

Your idea surprises me. It is a surprising idea," she said with a

surprised tone of voice.

Students sometimes confuse these two forms. One student, for example, once said

that lie was boring in the English class. He meant, of course, that he was bored.

"He was a boring student" means that he caused others to be bored.

"He was a bored student" means that others caused him to be bored.

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