Possessive adjectives, also known as
possessive determiners, are a part of speech that modifies a
nounIn linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
by attributing possession (or other sense of belonging) to someone or something. In
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, the words
my,
your and
her are examples.
Possessive adjectives/determiners can eliminate repetition in a sentence by replacing a
determiner phraseIn linguistics, a determiner phrase is a syntactic category, a phrase headed by a determiner. The noun phrase is strictly speaking a determiner phrase, and NP designates a constituent of the noun phrase, taken to be the complement of the determiner. This is opposed to the traditional view that...
(or in other analyses, a
noun phraseIn grammar, a noun phrase, nominal phrase, or nominal group is a phrase based on a noun, pronoun, or other noun-like word optionally accompanied by modifiers such as adjectives....
). They allow us, for example, to say
the girl took off her glasses instead of
the girl took off the girl's glasses.
Comparison with determiners and adjectives
Possessive determiners/adjectives have features of both determiners and
adjectiveIn grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....
s:
- Possessive determiners always imply the article the. For example, my car always means the car that belongs to me or the car that I am regularly using. Therefore, possessive determiners function as determiners and as such are not used with most other determiners including articles
An article is a word that combines with a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. Articles specify the grammatical definiteness of the noun, in some languages extending to volume or numerical scope. The articles in the English language are the and a/an, and some...
such as the or demonstrativeIn linguistics, demonstratives are deictic words that indicate which entities a speaker refers to and distinguishes those entities from others...
s such as that, which are usually required in English and some other European languages before a noun whose identity is known to the listener. For example, My hat is blue is grammatically correct, but The my hat is blue is not. Like definite articles, possessive determiners may be used with cardinal numbers, as in My three children are married or Three of my children are married, or indefinite quantifiers, as in Some of my children are married.
- Like other adjectives, possessive adjectives may be modified with an adverb
An adverb is a part of speech that modifies verbs or any part of speech other than a noun . Adverbs can modify verbs, adjectives , clauses, sentences, and other adverbs....
, though this is uncommon. The adverbs more, less, or as much ... as (comparativeIn grammar, the comparative is the form of an adjective or adverb which denotes the degree or grade by which a person, thing, or other entity has a property or quality greater or less in extent than that of another, and is used in this context with a subordinating conjunction, such as than,...
) or mostly (superlativeIn grammar, the superlative is the form of an adjective that indicates that the person or thing modified has the quality of the adjective to a degree greater than that of anything it is being compared to in a given context. English superlatives are typically formed with the suffix -est In...
) sometimes appear, for example in This is more my team than your team, This is less my team than your team, This is as much my team as your team, and This is mostly my team.
Nomenclature
While some classify the words
my,
your, etc. as
possessive adjectives, others, due to the differences noted above, do not consider them adjectives – at least, not in English – and prefer
possessive determiners. In some other languages the equivalent parts of speech behave more like true adjectives, however.
The words
my,
your, etc. are sometimes classified, along with
mine,
yours etc., as
possessive pronouns or
genitive pronouns, since they are the
possessiveThe possessive case of a language is a grammatical case used to indicate a relationship of possession. It is not the same as the genitive case, which can express a wider range of relationships, though the two have similar meanings in many languages.See Possession for a survey of the different...
(or
genitiveIn grammar, genitive is the grammatical case that marks a noun as modifying another noun...
) forms of the ordinary personal pronouns
I,
you etc. However, unlike most other
pronounIn linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...
s, they do not behave grammatically as stand-alone nouns, but instead qualify another noun – as in
my book (contrasted with
that's mine, for example, where
mine substitutes for a complete noun phrase such as
my book). For this reason, other authors restrict the term "possessive pronoun" to the group of words
mine,
yours etc. that substitute directly for a noun or noun phrase.
Some authors who classify both sets of words as "possessive pronouns" or "genitive pronouns" apply the terms
dependent/independent or
weak/strong to refer, respectively, to
my,
your, etc. and
mine,
yours, etc. For example, under this scheme,
my is termed a
dependent possessive pronoun and
mine an
independent possessive pronoun.
"Possessive adjectives" in English
The "possessive adjectives" in modern English are
my,
your,
his,
her,
its,
our,
their and
whose (in
Whose coat is this?, for example). All of them indicate
definitenessIn grammatical theory, definiteness is a feature of noun phrases, distinguishing between entities which are specific and identifiable in a given context and entities which are not ....
, like the
definite articleTHE is a three-letter acronym that may refer to:*Technische Hogeschool Eindhoven , a Dutch university of technology...
the. Archaic forms are
thy and
mine (for
my, used before a vowel, as in
It is mine own work).
The possessive suffix
-'sIn English language teaching, the term "Saxon genitive" is used to associate the possessive use of the apostrophe with the historical origin in Anglo Saxon of the morpheme that it represents...
works similarly (as in
Mary's husband,
anyone's guess), but it is a
cliticIn morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that is grammatically independent, but phonologically dependent on another word or phrase. It is pronounced like an affix, but works at the phrase level...
attached to the preceding
determiner phraseIn linguistics, a determiner phrase is a syntactic category, a phrase headed by a determiner. The noun phrase is strictly speaking a determiner phrase, and NP designates a constituent of the noun phrase, taken to be the complement of the determiner. This is opposed to the traditional view that...
.
In English, "possessive adjectives" come before any (genuine) adjectives, for example
your big blue eyes, not
big blue your eyes.
"Possessive adjectives" in English are sometimes misspelled with apostrophes ("it's", "her's").
Possessive adjectives in other languages
Though in English the possessive adjectives indicate definiteness, in other languages the definiteness needs to be added separately for grammatical correctness. In
NorwegianNorwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
the phrase "my book" would be
boka mi, where
boka is the definite form of the feminine noun
bok (book), and
mi (my) is the possessive pronoun following feminine singular nouns.
In most
Romance languagesThe Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
(such as
SpanishSpanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
,
FrenchFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, and
ItalianItalian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
) the gender of the possessive adjective agrees with the thing(s) owned, not with the owner. French, for example, uses
son for masculine nouns and also for feminine noun phrases starting with a vowel,
sa elsewhere; compare
Il a perdu son chapeau ("He lost his hat") with
Elle a perdu son chapeau ("She lost her hat"). In this respect the possessive adjectives in these languages resemble ordinary adjectives.
In
ItalianItalian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
, constructions such as
il tuo libro nero ("the your book black ", rendered in English as "your black book") and
quel tuo libro nero ("that your book black", rendered in English as "that black book of yours") are grammatically correct. In Italian, the possessive adjectives behave in almost every respect like ordinary adjectives.
Some
Germanic languagesThe Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...
, such as English and
DutchDutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
, use different pronouns depending on the owner. English has the (uninflected) words
his and
her; Dutch uses the (uninflected)
zijn and
haar.
Other Germanic languages, such as
GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
and several
Dutch dialectsDutch dialects are primarily the dialects that are both cognate with the Dutch language and are spoken in the same language area as the Dutch standard language. Dutch dialects are remarkably diverse and are found in the Netherlands and northern Belgium....
including Limburgish and
BrabantianBrabantian or Brabantish, also Brabantic , is a dialect group of the Dutch language. It is named after the historical Duchy of Brabant which corresponded mainly to the Dutch province of North Brabant, the Belgian provinces of Antwerp and Flemish Brabant, as well as the institutional Region of...
, have features of both systems. German has
sein (with inflected forms like
seine) for masculine and
ihr (with inflected forms like
ihre) for feminine possessors; in German, the "hat" sentences above would be
Er hat seinen Hut verloren and
Sie hat ihren Hut verloren respectively. Brabantian inflects
zijn (his) and
haar (her) according to the grammatical gender and number of the thing(s) owned.
Some languages have no distinctive possessive adjectives, and express
possessionPossession, in the context of linguistics, is an asymmetric relationship between two constituents, the referent of one of which possesses the referent of the other ....
by declining personal pronouns in the
genitiveIn grammar, genitive is the grammatical case that marks a noun as modifying another noun...
or
possessive caseThe possessive case of a language is a grammatical case used to indicate a relationship of possession. It is not the same as the genitive case, which can express a wider range of relationships, though the two have similar meanings in many languages.See Possession for a survey of the different...
, or by using
possessive suffixIn linguistics, a possessive affix is a suffix or prefix attached to a noun to indicate its possessor, much in the manner of possessive adjectives. Possessive suffixes are found in some Uralic, Altaic, Semitic, and Indo-European languages...
es or
particleIn grammar, a particle is a function word that does not belong to any of the inflected grammatical word classes . It is a catch-all term for a heterogeneous set of words and terms that lack a precise lexical definition...
s. In
Japaneseis a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
, for example,
boku no (a word for
I coupled with the genitive particle
no), is used for
my or
mine. In Mandarin Chinese, the possessive adjective and possessive pronoun take the same form as each other: the form associated with
wǒ ("I") is
wǒ de ("my", "mine"), where
de is the possessive particle.
Some languages use the same word for both the possessive adjective and the matching possessive pronoun. For example, in Finnish (informal)
meiän can mean either
our or
ours.
Semantics
For possessive adjectives as elsewhere, the genitive does not always indicate strict
possession, but rather a general sense of
belonging or
close identification with. Consider the following examples:
- Here, a person does not own his or her mother, but rather has a close relationship with her. The same applies to my people, which means people I am closely associated with or people I identify with.
- his train (as in "If Bob doesn't get to the station in ten minutes he's going to miss his train")
- Here, Bob most likely does not own the train and instead his train means the train Bob plans to travel on.
- my CD (as in "The kids are enjoying my CD")
- my CD could refer to a CD that I own, a CD owned by someone else but with music that I recorded as an artist, a CD that I have just given to someone here as a gift, or one with some other relation to me that would be identifiable in the context.
Forms
Possessive adjectives commonly have similar forms to
personal pronounPersonal pronouns are pronouns used as substitutes for proper or common nouns. All known languages contain personal pronouns.- English personal pronouns :English in common use today has seven personal pronouns:*first-person singular...
s. In addition, they have corresponding
possessive pronounA possessive pronoun is a part of speech that substitutes for a noun phrase that begins with a possessive determiner . For example, in the sentence These glasses are mine, not yours, the words mine and yours are possessive pronouns and stand for my glasses and your glasses, respectively...
s, which are also phonetically similar. The following chart shows the English,
GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, and
FrenchFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
personal pronouns, possessive adjectives, and possessive pronouns (masculine nominative singular only).
| Possessor | | English | | German | | French |
Pers.
pron.
(obj) | Poss.
adj. | Poss.
pron. |
Pers.
pron.
(genIn grammar, genitive is the grammatical case that marks a noun as modifying another noun...
) | Poss.
adj. | Poss.
pron. |
Pers.
pron.
(datThe dative case is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given, as in "George gave Jamie a drink"....
) | Poss.
adj. | Poss.
pron. |
| Singular | | 1st |
me |
my |
mine |
meiner |
mein |
meiner |
me |
mon |
le mien |
| 2nd |
you |
your |
yours |
deiner |
dein |
deiner |
te |
ton |
le tien |
| 3rd | masc. |
him |
his |
his |
seiner |
sein |
seiner |
lui |
son |
le sien |
| fem. |
her |
her |
hers |
ihrer |
ihr |
ihrer |
| neut. |
it |
its |
(its) |
seiner |
sein |
seiner |
|
| Plural | | 1st |
us |
our |
ours |
unser |
unser |
unserer |
nous |
notre |
le nôtre |
| 2nd |
you |
your |
yours |
euer |
euer |
eurer |
vous |
votre |
le vôtre |
| 3rd |
them |
their |
theirs |
ihrer |
ihr |
ihrer |
leur |
leur |
le leur |