possessive case

The 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 (linguistics) for a survey of the different categories of possession distinguished in languages.

The English possessive

The term "possessive case" is often used to refer to the "'s" morpheme, which is suffixed onto many nouns in English to denote possession. This categorization is arguably not strictly correct — some grammarians contend that this affix is actually a clitic. By descent, however, the English usage does stem from a case ending, Old English -es. See genitive case for details. For information on how to properly construct the possessive form, see apostrophe.

English Examples

English is one of the few languages that still utilizes the Possessive Case. Most languages use the Genitive Case. Here are some examples of the Possessive case being applied in the English language.

See also

• Possessive apostrophe
• Saxon genitive
• Genitive case

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