Saxon Genitive

Saxon Genitive

In English, possessive words or phrases exist for nouns and most pronouns, as well as some noun phrases. These can play the roles of determiners (also called possessive adjectives when corresponding to a pronoun) or of nouns.

Nouns, noun phrases and some pronouns generally form a possessive with the suffix -'s (or in some cases just by adding an apostrophe to an existing -s). This form, particularly in English language teaching, is sometimes called the Saxon genitive, reflecting the suffix's derivation from a genitive case ending in Old English (which in older scholarship was known as Anglo-Saxon). Personal pronouns, however, have irregular possessives, and most of them have different forms for possessive determiners and possessive pronouns, such as my and mine or your and yours.

Possessives are one of the means by which genitive constructions are formed in modern English, the other principal one being the use of the preposition of. It is sometimes stated that the possessives represent a grammatical case, called the genitive or possessive case, though many linguists do not accept this view, regarding the -'s ending as a clitic rather than as a case ending.