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: Saxon Genitive
Famous quotes containing the words syntactic, functions, possessive, words and/or phrases:
“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.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“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.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“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)
“In the life of the human spirit, words are action, much more so than many of us may realize who live in countries where freedom of expression is taken for granted. The leaders of totalitarian nations understand this very well. The proof is that words are precisely the action for which dissidents in those countries are being persecuted.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“She loved Cecil; George made her nervous; will the reader explain to her that the phrases should have been reversed?”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)