Possessive adjective Totally Explained

Everything about Possessive Adjective totally explained

What are traditionally and popularly called possessive adjectives — in linguistic analyses possessive pronouns, possessive determiners or genitive pronouns — are a part of speech that prototypically modifies a noun by attributing possession to someone or something (but see below). Depending on the theory the grammar subscribes to, English "possessive adjectives" are determiners or pronouns: possessive determiners, possessive pronouns, dependent genitive pronouns, weak possessive pronouns, and so forth. They are not adjectives, because they can be substituted for and can't co-occur with another determiner such as an article or a demonstrative:

the black book
that black book
your black book
*the your black book
*that your black book
*your the black book
*your that black book

English possessive adjectives

There are seven of these personal pronouns in modern English: my, your, his, her, its, our, and their. (The suffix -'s works similarly, but it's a clitic attached to the preceding determiner phrase.) All of them indicate definiteness, like the definite article the. Since in English they can't co-occur with an article, phrases like "a book of mine" or "one of my books" must be used instead of incorrect "*a my book." Their strong forms — used independently (Mine is broken; can I use yours?) — are mine, yours, his, hers, ours and theirs (prenominal its has no predicative equivalent).
Some languages have no such distinctive pronouns, and express possession by declining personal pronouns in the genitive or possessive case, or by using possessive suffixes. In Japanese, for example, boku no (a word for I with genitive particle), is used for "my" or "mine".
Possessive pronouns can avoid repetitions in a sentence by replacing a determiner phrase: they allow us to say "the girl took off her glasses" instead of "the girl took off the girl's glasses".

Forms

Possessive adjectives (or possessive determiners) commonly have similar forms to personal pronouns. In addition, they've corresponding possessive pronouns, which are also phonetically similar. The following chart shows the English, German, and French personal pronouns, possessive adjectives, and possessive pronouns (masculine nominative singular only).

Possessor			English			German			French
Possessor			Pers. pron. (obj)	Poss. adj.	Poss. pron.	Pers. pron. (gen)	Poss. adj.	Poss. pron.	Pers. pron. (dat)	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	Masculine	him	his	his	seiner	sein	seiner	lui	son	le sien
		Feminine	her	her	hers	ihrer	ihr	ihrer	lui	son	le sien
		Neuter	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

Semantics

For pronouns as elsewhere, the genitive doesn't always attribute possession. Consider the following examples:

my child and my mother Although one might argue for ownership of a child, it's much harder to argue for the ownership of a mother. The relation here isn't ownership but kinship.

my dream This relation is less clear: one doesn't quite own their dreams.

his train (as in "If Bob doesn't get to the station in 10 minutes he's going to miss his train") Bob normally doesn't own the train.

my CD (as in "The kids are enjoying my CD") This noun phrase could refer to the CD that I own, the one with music that I recorded, the one that I bought for the kids, or some other relation identifiable in the context.

Common misspelling

It is worth remembering that no possessive determiner of English has an apostrophe, although a number of them, like its, are homophonous with pronoun-auxiliary contractions:

pronoun - genitive forms	whose?	my	your	his	her	its	our	their
'be' verb (contracted forms)	who's?	I'm	you're	he's	she's	it's	we're	they're

The pronoun its is very commonly misspelled; not only is there the homophone it's (a form of either "it is" or "it has"), but -'s is a genitive clitic.

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