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The possessive form of an English noun, or more generally a noun phrase, is made by suffixing a morpheme which is represented orthographically as ' s (the letter s preceded by an apostrophe), and is pronounced in the same way as the regular English plural ending (e)s: namely, as / ɪ z / when following a sibilant sound (/ s /, / z /, / ʃ /, / ʒ /, / tʃ / or / dʒ /), as / s / when following ...
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 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.
The personal pronouns retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class (a remnant of the more extensive Germanic case system of Old English). For other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, grammatical function is indicated only by word order, by prepositions, and by the "Saxon genitive or English possessive" (-'s ...
Personal pronouns are also often associated with possessive forms. English has two sets of such forms: the possessive determiners (also called possessive adjectives) my, your, his, her, its, our and their, and the possessive pronouns mine, yours, his, hers, its (rare), ours, theirs (for more details see English possessive). In informal usage ...
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.
In 1892, prior to the emergence of the determiner category in English grammars, Leon Kellner, and later Jespersen, [8] discussed the idea of "determination" of a noun: In Old English the possessive pronoun, or, as the French say, "pronominal adjective," expresses only the conception of belonging and possession; it is a real adjective, and does ...
Although English pronouns can have subject and object forms (he/him, she/her), nouns show only a singular/plural and a possessive/non-possessive distinction (e.g. chair, chairs, chair's, chairs'); there is no manifest difference in the form of chair between "The chair is here." (subject) and "I own the chair."