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The possessive determiners (also called possessive adjectives or, misleadingly, possessive pronouns; analogous to English my, their, etc.) are used to indicate the possessor of the noun they determine. They lexically mark the person and number of the possessor, and are inflected to agree with their noun in gender and number.
A number of adjectives (often having to do with beauty, age, goodness, or size, a tendency summarized by the acronym "BAGS"), come before their nouns: une belle femme ("a beautiful woman"). With a few adjectives of the latter type, there are two masculine singular forms: one used before consonants (the basic form), and one used before vowels.
For example, English uses a possessive clitic, 's; a preposition, of; and adjectives, my, your, his, her, etc. Predicates denoting possession may be formed either by using a verb (such as the English have) or by other means, such as existential clauses (as is usual in languages such as Russian). Some languages have more than two possessive classes.
The French terminations -ois / -ais serve as both the singular and plural masculine; adding e (-oise / -aise) makes them singular feminine; es (-oises / -aises) makes them plural feminine. The Spanish and Portuguese termination -o usually denotes the masculine , and is normally changed to feminine by dropping the -o and adding -a .
The personal pronouns of many languages correspond to both a set of possessive determiners and a set of possessive pronouns.For example, the English personal pronouns I, you, he, she, it, we and they correspond to the possessive determiners my, your, his, her, its, our and their and also to the (substantive) possessive pronouns mine, yours, his, hers, its (rare), ours and theirs.
This is a key difference from English: in English, possessive pronouns are inflected to indicate the gender and number of their antecedent — e.g., in "the tables are his", the form "his" indicates that the antecedent (the possessor) is masculine singular, whereas in the French les tables sont les siennes, "siennes" or its base form "sien ...
Possessive determiners, as used in English and some other languages, imply the definite article.For example, my car implies the car of mine. (However, "This is the car I have" implies that it is the only car you have, whereas "This is my car" does not imply that to the same extent.
Catalan, French, Italian, and Occitan surnames sometimes contain apostrophes of elision, e.g. d’Alembert, D'Angelo. French feminine singular possessive adjectives do not undergo such elision anymore, but change to the masculine form instead: ma preceding église becomes mon église ('my church'). [note 9]
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