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)
“One of the most highly valued functions of used parents these days is to be the villains of their children’s lives, the people the child blames for any shortcomings or disappointments. But if your identity comes from your parents’ failings, then you remain forever a member of the child generation, stuck and unable to move on to an adulthood in which you identify yourself in terms of what you do, not what has been done to you.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“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)
“The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather are metaphors.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)