What part of speech is the word “not”?
It’s a no brainer that “not” is always referred to as an adverb. Look in any dictionary and that becomes clear. However, it cannot be denied that when identifying a part of speech we must look at how it functions in the sentence in which it is being used. In the following sentence, it simply does not work as an adverb and works only as an adjective. She should have used those gift cards before January 1, 2008 because not one of them now has a balance. One might argue that the sentence could be changed to read: “…because now one of them has not a balance,” but to do so inherently changes the intended meaning of the sentence. As rewritten, only one of the gift cards does not have a balance. Therefore, in this sentence, “not” is modifying the pronoun “one” by telling us “how many” gift cards have a balance and, in this case, zero of them do. “How many, which one, and what kind” all point to a word being a descriptive word, also known as an adjective.
