You mean you want part of speech tagging?
>>> import nltk
>>> tokens = nltk.word_tokenize("People took to the streets and protested")
>>> nltk.pos_tag(tokens)
[('People', 'NNS'), ('took', 'VBD'), ('to', 'TO'), ('the', 'DT'), ('streets', 'NNS'), ('and', 'CC'), ('protested', 'VBD')]