Possessive adjective
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A possessive adjective, also called a possessive determiner or possessive article, is a part of speech that modifies a noun by attributing ownership to someone or something (with some exceptions noted below). It is grammatically a determiner rather than an adjective because it cannot co-occur with another determiner such as an article or a demonstrative, but it can co-occur with adjectives. It is also called by some a determinative possessive pronoun, although it is not a pronoun.
There are seven of them in modern English: my, your, his, her, its, our, their. The suffix -'s works similarly, but it is a clitic attached to the preceding noun phrase. All of them indicate definiteness like the definite article the. Since in English they cannot co-occur with an indefinite article, phrases like "a book of mine" or "one of my books" must be used instead of incorrect "*a my book." For a list of English possessive adjectives and their corresponding pronouns, see the table of English personal pronouns, possessive pronouns and adjectives.
Some languages have neither possessive adjectives nor possessive pronouns, and express possession by declining the personal pronouns in the genitive or possessive case, or by using possessive suffixes. In Finnish, for example, minun ("I's"), means "my" or "mine".[citation needed]
Like possessive pronouns, possessive adjectives can prevent repetitions in a sentence by substituting a noun phrase with -'s. For example, they allow us to say "Sally took off her glasses" instead of "Sally took off Sally's glasses".
[edit] Semantics
Possessives do not always attribute ownership. Consider the following examples:
- my child and my mother
Although ownership of a child could be argued for, it's much more difficult to create a similar link for the ownership of a mother. Thus, here, the relation is not ownership but kinship.
- my dream
This relation is less clear: one does not quite own their dreams. It may be said that dreams are "had" but not for very long.
- his train (as in the sentence "If Bob doesn't get to the station in 10 minutes he's going to miss his train")
Bob normally does not own the train.
- my CD (as in "The kids are really enjoying my CD")
This noun phrase could imply ownership. However, if Pavarotti utters the sentence, he is most likely not talking about the CD he owns but the CD which contains music performed by him.
[edit] Common misspelling
The possessive adjective its is one of the most commonly misspelled words in the English language; many people are confused by its homonym it's (which can be an abbreviation for either "it is" or "it has"), due to the fact that -'s is a possessive suffix on nouns.
It is worth remembering that no possessive adjective (or possessive pronoun) in English contains an apostrophe. A possibly useful mnemonic is
- Whose? My, your, his, her, its, our, their.
- Who's? I'm, you're, he's, she's, it's, we're, they're.
