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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 ...
By contrast, nouns have no distinct nominative and objective forms, the two being merged into a single plain case. For example, chair does not change form between "the chair is here" (subject) and "I saw the chair" (direct object). Possession is shown by the clitic-'s attached to a possessive noun phrase, rather than by declension of the noun ...
Plural number is often said to mean more than one, [24] but, in fact, it restricts the denotation of the noun to the set of non-singularities. That is, in English, plural nouns are appropriate for quantities denoted by all the real numbers, including 0 and other quantities smaller than 1, except exactly ±1.
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.
Possessive determiners may also be taken to include possessive forms made from nouns, from other pronouns and from noun phrases, such as John's, the girl's, somebody's, the king of Spain's, when used to modify a following noun. In many languages, possessive determiners are subject to agreement with the noun they modify, as in the French mon, ma ...
For example, in Spanish, nouns composed of a verb and its plural object usually have the verb first and noun object last (e.g. the legendary monster chupacabras, literally "sucks-goats", or in a more natural English formation "goatsucker") and the plural form of the object noun is retained in both the singular and plural forms of the compound ...
Possession may be marked in many ways, such as simple juxtaposition of nouns, possessive case, possessed case, construct state (as in Arabic and Nêlêmwa), [3] or adpositions (possessive suffixes, possessive adjectives). For example, English uses a possessive clitic, 's; a preposition, of; and adjectives, my, your, his, her, etc.
The plural genitive did not use the "-es" inflection, [9] and since many plural forms already consisted of the "-s" or "-es" ending, using the apostrophe in place of the elisioned "e" could lead to singular and plural possessives of a given word having the exact same spelling.