How Part of Speech Analysis Works

Shaxpir uses Part of Speech Analysis to power its highlighters for Helping Verbs, Adverbs, and Prepositions.

Here's how we conduct our analysis for each of those parts of speech:

Helping Verbs

Luckily, the total set of helping verbs and prepositions in English is pretty small, so we just assembled a list:

am, are, be, been, being, can, could, did, do, does, had, has, have, is, may, might, must, shall, should, was, were, will, would

Then of course, we have to add in all the negated contraction forms for these words:

aren’t, can’t, couldn’t, didn’t, doesn’t, don’t, hadn’t, hasn’t, haven’t, isn’t, mayn’t, mightn’t, mustn’t, shan’t, shouldn’t, wasn’t, weren’t, won’t, wouldn’t

And then we need to include all the pronoun contractions that go along with these. This is a longer list, so I won’t include the whole thing here, but it includes words like these:

he’d, he’ll, she’d, she’ll, they’d, they’ll, we’d, we’ll, who’d, who’ll, you’d, you’ll

Finally, let’s not forget to include in some archaic forms of these! Here are a few samples:

dost, didst, mayest, mightest, shalt, shant, thou’rt, thou’st, ye’ll, ye’d, ‘tis, ‘twas

The combined list of all these words is how we recognize helping verbs on the page, so that you can use our Helping Verb Highlighter to make your sentences more active and compelling!

Adverbs

To implement our adverb analysis, we had to be a bit more sophisticated, because there are thousands of different adverbs, and you can make your own adverbs anytime you want!

For example, if I introduce a new adjective (“froopy”) in my novel, I can easily construct a new adverb based on that adjective (“froopily”) just by following some simple morphology rules.

It would be tempting just match all words ending in “ly” and mark them as adverbs, but there are plenty of words ending in “ly” that aren’t adverbs (fly, sly, tingly, wriggly, etc). And there are quite a few non-ly adverbs (almost, often, however, very) including quite a few “conjunctive adverbs” (also, furthermore, nevertheless, etc).

So our adverb analysis is based on a hybrid approach of word-lists, morphology patterns, and exclusion lists (we’ve compiled a list of more than 700 words ending in “ly” that aren’t adverbs). All this effort so that we can give you an Adverb Highlighter that helps you observe and improve your own writing.

Prepositions

The list of English prepositions is a similar size (fewer than 100 in total), so we just assembled a list of words. Here's a small sample:

above, across, after, against, around, before, behind, between, for, from, in, into, of, over, than, through, to, under, up, until, with, without

Some of these words (in, up) can also act as “particles” instead of prepositions (“After eating so many hot dogs, Johnny threw up!”) And the word “to” often acts as an infinitive-marker (“to err is human!”) We don't attempt to distinguish these other usages from prepositions, however.

Since our technique simply involves a match against the word-list, it's not 100% accurate. But even with those known inaccuracies, it’s still a useful tool in the aggregate. Using the Preposition Highlighter is a great way to observe the complexity of your sentences and be mindful of writing with clarity and simplicity.