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The possessive form of an English noun, or more generally a noun phrase, is made by suffixing a morpheme which is represented orthographically as ' s (the letter s preceded by an apostrophe), and is pronounced in the same way as the regular English plural ending (e)s: namely, as / ɪ z / when following a sibilant sound (/ s /, / z /, / ʃ /, / ʒ /, / tʃ / or / dʒ /), as / s / when following ...
For example, English uses a possessive clitic, 's; a preposition, of; and adjectives, my, your, his, her, etc. Predicates denoting possession may be formed either by using a verb (such as the English have) or by other means, such as existential clauses (as is usual in languages such as Russian). Some languages have more than two possessive classes.
Words like the English my and your have traditionally been called possessive adjectives. [5] [6] However, modern linguists note that they behave more like determiners rather than true adjectives (see examples in the § Syntax section above), and thus prefer the term possessive determiner. In some other languages, however, the equivalent words ...
Some traditional grammars of English refer to them as possessive adjectives, though they do not have the same syntactic distribution as bona fide adjectives. [ 1 ] Examples in English include possessive forms of the personal pronouns , namely: my , your , his , her , its , our and their , but excluding those forms such as mine , yours , ours ...
Although English adjectives do not participate in the system of number the way determiners, nouns, and pronouns do, English adjectives may still express number semantically. For example, adjectives like several, various, and multiple are semantically plural, while those like single, lone, and unitary have singular semantics. [31]
Personal pronouns are also often associated with possessive forms. English has two sets of such forms: the possessive determiners (also called possessive adjectives) my, your, his, her, its, our and their, and the possessive pronouns mine, yours, his, hers, its (rare), ours, theirs (for more details see English possessive). In informal usage ...
Dirty words for body parts (p*ssy, c*ck, d*ck, t*ts, etc.) are also worth discussing; there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of them, but some people have strong reactions to one over another ...
Adjective phrases containing complements after the adjective cannot normally be used as attributive adjectives before a noun. Sometimes they are used attributively after the noun , as in a woman proud of being a midwife (where they may be converted into relative clauses: a woman who is proud of being a midwife ), but it is wrong to say * a ...