Note that when can also act as interrogative adverb in sentences where it’s not a question word. “When did you last see him?” My friend asked. The most common interrogative adverbs are when, where, why, and how. If you recall, adverbs convey information about time, place, manner, degree, reason, etc. It can function as an interrogative adverb: interrogative because it is in the form of a question and adverb because it conveys information about time. The first section looks at when in its role of asking questions.

We’ll also look at few parts of speech it doesn’t belong to, but few erroneously think it does. In this post, we’ll analyze the word when grammatically, looking at the four parts of speech it belongs to: adverb (two types), conjunction, noun, and pronoun. But, like down, they function as quite a few parts of speech. People find it hard to associate question words such as when with any part of speech, as they think that question words are made just to ask questions and do nothing else in a sentence. The team was little down after yesterday’s close loss. For example, word down can be an adverb, a verb, a preposition, or an adjective: Depending on how it is used in a sentence, a word can belong to more than one part of speech. See also doubt, than.A word doesn’t necessarily belong to a particular part of speech.

However, when prepositional but and its following pronoun occur near the beginning of a sentence, the subjective case often appears: Everyone but she lost faith in the plan. In virtually identical contexts, when but is understood as a preposition, the pronoun following it is in the objective case: Everyone lost faith but her. When but is understood as a conjunction and the pronoun following it is understood as the subject of an incompletely expressed clause, the pronoun is in the subjective case: Everyone lost faith in the plan but she ( did not lose faith ). The cast is nearly complete, but, our efforts notwithstanding, we lack a star. When it is used in the middle of a sentence as a coordinating conjunction like and or so, it is not followed by a comma unless the comma is one of a pair setting off a parenthetical expression: His political affiliations make no difference, but his lack of ethics does. But, like and, is a common transitional word and often begins sentences.

What part of speech is the word but