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These are often known as possessive or genitive determiners. They are used before the noun referring to what is possessed (and before the rest of the whole noun phrase, for example when an adjective precedes the noun). They inflect for number and in some cases gender as well.
In English, for example, the words my, your etc. are used without articles and so can be regarded as possessive determiners whereas their Italian equivalents mio etc. are used together with articles and so may be better classed as adjectives. [4] Not all languages can be said to have a lexically distinct class of determiners.
French also correlates possessive determiners to both the plurality of the possessor and possessee, as in notre voiture (our car) and nos voitures (our cars). In Modern Spanish, however, not all possessive determiners change to reflect the gender of the possessee, as is the case for mi, tu, and su, e.g. mi hijo y mi hija ("my
NEG se CL puede can. 1SG pisar walk el the césped grass No se puede pisar el césped NEG CL can.1SG walk the grass "You cannot walk on the grass." Zagona also notes that, generally, oblique phrases do not allow for a double clitic, yet some verbs of motion are formed with double clitics: María María se CL fue went.away- 3SG María se fue María CL went.away-3SG "Maria went away ...
Although the DP analysis is the dominant view in generative grammar, most other grammar theories reject the idea. For instance, representational phrase structure grammars follow the NP analysis, e.g. Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, and most dependency grammars such as Meaning-Text Theory, Functional Generative Description, and Lexicase Grammar also assume the traditional NP analysis of ...
This syncretism with the genitive is commonly referred to as the relative case. Nez Perce has a three-way nominal case system with both ergative ( -nim ) and accusative ( -ne ) plus an absolute (unmarked) case for intransitive subjects: hipáayna qíiwn ‘the old man arrived’; hipáayna wewúkiye ‘the elk arrived’; wewúkiyene péexne ...
A typical example is a language that has nominative-accusative marking on verbs and ergative–absolutive case marking on nouns. Georgian has an ergative alignment, but the agent is only marked with the ergative case in the perfective aspect (also known as the "aorist screeve ").
A genitive construction involves two nouns, the head (or modified noun) and the dependent (or modifier noun). In dependent-marking languages, a dependent genitive noun modifies the head by expressing some property of it. For example, in the construction "John's jacket", "jacket" is the head and "John's" is the modifier, expressing a property of ...