Possessive case
Wikipedia on Answers.com:
Top
Possessive case
 |
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2007) |
The possessive case (abbreviated POS or POSS) 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.[citation needed]
See Possession (linguistics) for a survey of the different categories of possession distinguished in languages.
|
Contents
|
The English possessive
Nouns
The term "possessive case" is often used to refer to the form of a noun suffixed with the "'s" morpheme. Calling it a case is arguably not strictly correct – some grammarians contend that this affix is actually a clitic.[nb 1] However, the English usage does stem from a case ending, Old English -es. See genitive case for details. For information on how to construct the possessive form in written English, see Possessive apostrophe.
In English the possessive can also be expressed periphrastically, by preceding the noun or noun phrase with the preposition of.
Examples
Here are some examples of the possessive case being applied to nouns in the English language.
| Nominative case | Possessive case | Example |
|---|---|---|
| child | child's, of the child | I have the child's bag |
| woman | woman's, of the woman | This is the woman's husband |
| car | car's, of the car | The car's wheels are off |
Pronouns
The 's morpheme is also used for English impersonal pronouns. For example, the possessive form of one is one's, and the possessive form of somebody is somebody's.
However, the 's morpheme is not used for English personal pronouns. Instead, special forms exist for them, and those forms do not use an apostrophe even when they end in an s: the possessive form of I is my when used as an adjective (It is my car) and mine when used as a noun (It is mine). For the other personal pronouns the possessives are: we → our, ours; you → your, yours; he → his, his; she → her, hers; they → their, theirs.
The possessive of it is a special case, having been formed in the 1600s in the same way as impersonal pronouns like one's, the apostrophe was dropped in the early 1800s, presumably to make it more similar to the personal pronouns.[1] The standard form is now it → its, its.
Likewise, the 's morpheme is not used for relative pronouns. The possessive form of both who/whom and which is whose.
The demonstrative pronouns this, that, these, and those do not have possessive forms.
See also
Notes
- ^ Consider the phrase: The King of England's horse. If the 's morpheme were not a clitic and actually a proper case, we would expect to see *The King's of England horse, since the King and not England possesses the horse in question. German, which has an inflected case system, phrases it Das Pferd des Königs von England, where König (king) takes the genitive case. In English, by contrast, the possessive 's morpheme is affixed to the whole noun phrase King of England.
References
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
Post a question - any question - to the WikiAnswers community:
Copyrights:
Wikipedia on Answers.com
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Possessive case.
Read more