Syntactic Functions of Possessive Words or Phrases
English possessives play two principal roles in syntax:
- the role of possessive determiners (more popularly called possessive adjectives; see Possessive: Terminology) standing before a noun, as in my house or John's two sisters;
- the role of possessive pronouns (although they may not always be called that), standing independently in place of a noun, as in mine is large; they prefer John's.
Read more about this topic: English Possessive
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“The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.”
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“Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole.”
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