Pls I need help to understand what part of the speech are this words

Question

Pls I need help to understand what part of the speech are this words:

A doze off

Not sleep a wink

A heavy sleeper

Light sleeper

Have a nightmare

Fall asleep

How I find (books or dictionary) what part of the speech is the word?

Thank you.

EnglishUSA · Accepted Answer

Use the internet! Put the words in quotes, and then add the letters ESL.

For example:

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=%22to+doze+off%22+esl&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Here are the corrected words:

zany tile 941A doze off

TO DOZE OFF

Not sleep a wink

TO NOT SLEEP A WINK

A heavy sleeper

HEAVY SLEEPER

Light sleeper

LIGHT SLEEPER

Have a nightmare

TO HAVE A NIGHTMARE

Fall asleep

TO FALL ASLEEP

Let me know if you have any more questions about this...

AlpheccaStars · Answer

zany tile 941Pls I need help to understand what part of the speech are these words:

Parts of speech apply to individual words, and you can find that information in a dictionary.

For example "sleeper" is a noun.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/sleeper?s=t

Are you asking about phrases? A phrase is a group of words..

To determine the part of speech of a phrase (more than one word), there are some rules to use.

First, determine if the phrase has a "head word". That is the word that determines how the phrase can be used in a sentence. (grammatically).
1. ignore modifiers

light sleeper - light is a modifier. and "sleeper" is a noun, so this is a noun phrase. Noun phrases can be used as nouns in a sentence.

2. Look for articles. ("a", "the" or "an") These mark noun phrases.

For example, "a doze off" is a noun phrase. ( But it does not appear to me to be good English because we have to force a verb "doze off" to be a noun. )

"A heavy sleeper" (This is a good noun phrase.)

The other examples in your list are not syntactical units. They do not have their own part of speech.

Not sleep a wink (This is a slice of words from a sentence without a syntactical function. e.g. He could not sleep a wink.)

Have a nightmare (This is an imperative sentence. )

Fall asleep (This is an imperative sentence. )

Pls I need help to understand what part of the speech are this words

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