| Possessive Adjective |
Article Index for Possessive |
Information AboutPossessive Adjective |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT POSSESSIVE ADJECTIVE | |
| english grammar | |
| parts of speech | |
|
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 ). English possessive adjectives are grammatically Determiner s rather than Adjective s, because they cannot modify the same noun as another determiner such as an Article or a Demonstrative , but they can co-occur with adjectives. These are also called by some Determinative Possessive Pronouns , although not Pronoun s.
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 Pronoun s, and express Possession by declining the Personal Pronoun s in the Genitive or Possessive Case , or by using Possessive Suffix es. In Finnish, for example, ''minun'' ("I's"), means "my" or "mine". Like Possessive Pronoun s, 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". SEMANTICS Possessives do not always attribute ownership. Consider the following examples:
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.
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.
Bob normally does not own the train.
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. COMMON MISSPELLING The possessive adjective ''its'' is one of the most commonly Misspelled words in the English language; many writers are confused by its Homophone ''it's'' (which can be a Contraction of 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, although a number of them, like ''its'', are homophonous with pronoun-auxiliary contractions: SEE ALSO |
|
|