possessive pronoun

A possessive pronoun is a part of speech that attributes ownership to someone or something. Like all other pronouns, it substitutes a noun phrase, and can prevent its repetition. For example, in the phrase, "These glasses are mine, not yours", the words "mine" and "yours" are possessive pronouns and stand for "my glasses" and "your glasses", respectively.

There are seven possessive pronouns in modern English: mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours, theirs. For a more complete list, see the table of English personal pronouns, possessive pronouns and adjectives.

Some languages have neither possessive pronouns nor possessive adjectives, and express possession by declining the personal pronouns in the genitive or possessive case, or by using possessive suffixes. In Finnish, for example, minun ("I's"), means "mine" or "my".^{[citation needed]}

Determinative and independent possessive pronouns

Some call possessive adjectives, perhaps confusingly, determinative possessive pronouns. "Determinative", because they constitute determiner phrases. It should be noted however that precisely because a possessive adjective constitutes a determiner sentence, and not a noun phrase, strictly speaking its lexical category is determiner, not pronoun.

In such contexts, in order to distinguish determinative possessive pronouns from the possessive pronouns described above, the latter are also called independent possessive pronouns, because they constitute full noun sentence and don't depend on a noun. For example, while "my" must be followed by a noun such as "glasses" in "my glasses", "mine" already subsumes such a noun.

See also

• Genitive case
• Possessive adjective
• Possessive case
• Possessive suffix
• Possession (linguistics)
• Pronoun

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