Possessive Determiners in English
The basic pronominal possessive determiners in modern English are my, your, his, her, its, our, their and whose (as in Whose coat is this? and the man whose car was stolen). As noted above, they indicate definiteness, like the definite article the. Archaic forms include thy and mine/thine (for my/thy before a vowel). For details, see English personal pronouns.
Other possessive determiners (although they may not always be classed as such, though they play the same role in syntax) are the words and phrases formed by attaching the clitic -'s (or sometimes just an apostrophe after -s) to other pronouns, to nouns and to noun phrases (sometimes called determiner phrases). Examples include Jane's, heaven's, the boy's, Jesus', the soldiers', those men's, the king of England's, one's, somebody's.
For more details of the formation and use of possessives in English, see English possessive. For more details about the use of determiners generally, see English determiners.
Read more about this topic: Possessive Determiner
Famous quotes containing the words possessive and/or english:
“The narcissistic, the domineering, the possessive woman can succeed in being a “loving” mother as long as the child is small. Only the really loving woman, the woman who is happier in giving than in taking, who is firmly rooted in her own existence, can be a loving mother when the child is in the process of separation.”
—Erich Fromm (20th century)
“We talked about and that has always been a puzzle to me
why American men think that success is everything
when they know that eighty percent of them are not
going to succeed more than to just keep going and why
if they are not why do they not keep on being
interested in the things that interested them when
they were college men and why American men different
from English men do not get more interesting as they
get older.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)