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It requires more explanation: in finnish meidän means our [1] minun means my [2]
what part of speech are these words? Mrdthree 03:23, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
The result of the proposal was no consensus to move per the discussion below. Dekimasu よ! 10:27, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
Most linguists now recognize adjectives and determiners are separate word classes, and what we traditionally call possessive adjectives are actually possessive determiners. I think this article should be moved to the correct name. - TAKASUGI Shinji 23:15, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
In this edit, Takasugi Shinji reverts an edit of mine, saying they are not pronouns but adjectives, or more precisely, determiners.
They are not adjectives. If you think they're adjectives, please explain this, cite a linguistics authority, or both.
Yes they are indeed determiners. Determiners are not a subclass of adjectives.
They are called pronouns by a lot of authorities; not only ivory-tower (?) theoretical linguists but also three of the foremost descriptive grammars of the last century: Modern English Grammar (Jespersen), Comprehensive Grammar (Quirk et al.), Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (eds Huddleston and Pullum): see the notes to the article.
If anyone wants to call them determiners, that's fine with me. Anyone who wants to call them adjectives is merely attempting to perpetuate a very dated and obviously mistaken myth.
Incidentally, what is this "(its)" within the table? -- Hoary ( talk) 13:49, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
While it is possible to use its as a predicate adjective (The cat is angry because the bowl you're eating out of is its!) or as a pronoun meaning “that or those belonging to it” (Your notebook pages are torn. Borrow my notebook — its aren't), such use is rare and in most circumstances strained.
According to CGEL (p. 471) examples like the following are "very occasionally found":
What does not seem to exist is the "oblique genitive" usage: *The Bank is being sued by a rich client of its.
CapnPrep ( talk) 14:57, 23 January 2009 (UTC)
It cheated! My score was higher than its was!
I have a very tough time understanding the intro. It starts by claiming there's no such thing as possessive adjectives and then go on explaining what this nonexistent thing is by preparing a Dagwood sandwich of items whose relation to this nonexistent thing is obscure by a very precise perfection. What is it? Is it a colloquial waste basket term for expressing possession? The intro uses too many sub-clauses, if the sentences are split into sentences with just a few sub-clauses, then it might be comprehensible. ... said: Rursus ( bork²) 08:41, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
This article ( Possessive adjective) is currently devoted to denying the existence of its topic, and then providing all the content that should be in the other article ( Possessive pronoun). I don't care what you call it, but it should all be in one article. CapnPrep ( talk) 09:17, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
I am sad that this merger lost steam. Even in this article, we call these "[weak] possessive pronouns". It makes no sense for an encyclopedia to have one name used as a title and another used throughout the article. And since both possessive pronouns and possessive adjectives contain words that are referred to as possessive pronouns, it makes sense for them to be in a single article entitled possessive pronoun.
As far as it is now, I count two votes for the merge. And I will add mine. I vote Merge. — trlkly 08:47, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
Whether or not the articles are merged, someone needs to sort out the problem whereby the article is titled "possessive adjective" and yet says in the first sentence that this nomenclature is "mistaken". 81.129.130.254 ( talk) 00:11, 15 December 2009 (UTC).
Possessive pronoun has almost nothing in it, and everything I could imagine adding to it is either already here in Possessive adjective, or would be equally relevant here. What we need (I think) is:
CapnPrep ( talk) 15:37, 22 December 2009 (UTC)
Possessive shows:
I suggest we need a Possessive (grammar) article which can serve as the lead article for all the possessive grammar related articles as well as the defining article for those topics which don't need their own article. P.S. I also did a bunch of updates to this article to try to make it more understandable. Facts707 ( talk) 18:29, 27 February 2010 (UTC)
Talk of the apostrophe revives my weak interest in this matter of genitive pronouns. (Previously, I'd only wanted to ensure that the article didn't give misinformation.) Of course the "possessive s" of a noun phrase in English is a clitic -- it's not *the Queen's of Sheba nose; and in the Queen of Sheba's nose, it's the Queen's nose, not Sheba's. Now, it's OK in some lects, perhaps most or even all, to talk of (perhaps while pointing to) him in the red jacket. So how about Him in the red jacket's gun is loaded? This sounds very odd to me but I'd hesitate to rule that it's completely unacceptable. If it is acceptable, it doesn't alter the fact that the genitive form of him is his, but it might call for careful phrasing.
Incidentally, while I can say That sister of mine's off sick, I can't contract the "is" in That brother of his is off in Sikkim. -- Hoary ( talk) 02:12, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
In an ecumenical mood I rebelled against my Minimalist doctrine and looked in a couple of surveys of English grammar with very different theoretical underpinnings.
Lynn M. Berk's
says its blurb (and thus the whopping exaggeration of the last bit). Oxford UP, 1999; ISBN 0-19-512353-0. According to Berk, my, mine and so forth are "genitive forms" of "personal pronouns" (p.83).
R M W Dixon's A Semantic Approach to English Grammar
says its blurb. Oxford UP, 2005; ISBN 0-19-924740-4. According to Dixon, these (with them and so forth) are again "pronouns"; among pronouns, my and mine are respectively "possessors" as "modifier" and "NP head" (p.20).
Feel free to add your own. However, these should be published by university presses or comparable firms (Blackwell, Norton) and for university students of linguistics, not stuff for high school kids or for the nervous consumers of books purporting to help them to avoid misteaks and to rite good. -- Hoary ( talk) 05:05, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
I don't think the table of possessive forms for German and French is correct. It should explain why the genetive and dative cases respectively are quoted for personal pronouns in these languages, and why the accusative is given for English. I think the page should be merged as suggested by Wikipedia with English possessive pronouns. The cases for other languages should be cited either in the Wikidepida site for that language or in the corresponding page on the English language site which explains the case. (I will attempt to do this if there are no objections). Bewp ( talk) 19:05, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
It seems unfortunate to me that the phrase "boka mi" ("my book") was chosen as the example to illustrate possessives in Norwegian, since the Japanese "boku no" is used as an example immediately afterward. A reader who is not proficient in languages might assume that "boku no" also has something to do with books, since the phrases look so similar. I do realize that the translation of "boku no" follows the Japanese in parentheses, but I still think it's a bad idea to have all those book/bok words in a row when they mean completely different things. Thus I recommend putting a different noun in the Norwegian example so that a user can keep track of the possessive forms that the entry is actually talking about. I don't know Norwegian so I can't make a suggestion, but no doubt there is another simple noun that can serve as a substitute -- shirt, house, cat, or what have you. -- Hapax ( talk) 20:11, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
I propose renaming this article to Possessive determiner, explaining that "possessive adjective" is an alternative name, but using the term "possessive determiner" throughout the body of the article. 81.151.230.144 ( talk) 15:20, 22 December 2009 (UTC). (I just noticed that this was previously proposed but rejected, but I think sufficient time has passed for another discussion to be in order.)
(Bouncing left) Somebody's added a link to the entry for "my" in Merriam-Webster something or other. This indeed calls these things adjectives. But that's a dictionary, not a grammar. (And a stunningly unthinking dictionary, it would seem.) I don't know of any informed, intelligent grammatical analysis that calls them adjectives (and I looked, too). ¶ The majority of analyses call them pronouns (or personal pronouns). ¶ The next question is of what (personal) pronouns are. With a Minimalist analysis, they (together with these, the, etc) are determiners. But plenty of grammarians (and most descriptive grammars, such as CGEL) would call "the book", "my book" etc not DP but NP. While this article, or its successor, should give the DP analysis, I now think that simply calling them determiners would blatantly violate NPOV. (Incidentally, CGEL calls "my" etc "determinatives", saying that they may have the function of "determiner".) ¶ This is all getting complex, so pronouns they should be. Somebody could reasonably claim that the article should cover words in other languages that are semantically similar to the pronouns of English but syntactically (quasi-) adjectival. If we went along with this, we could subsume them under the broader term "pronominals". However, while this could be done, I don't see any compelling reason for doing it. And the faction (visible some way above on this very talk page) that's keen not to have accuracy disturb readers' comfortable misunderstandings would be tiresomely outraged by "pronominal". As pronouns are a broad and somewhat fuzzy category ("whosoever", "each other", etc), I recommend personal pronoun for I, me, my, mine, myself, etc. --
Hoary (
talk) 08:59, 5 January 2010 (UTC) .... deletion
Hoary (
talk)
02:40, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
It won't make sense to have the 2 together. They are 2 different things. There will be 2 much confusion, 2. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.7.203.167 ( talk) 20:52, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
I agree with certain others here that this re-classification of possessive determiners as "adjectives" is nonsensical, and that this page needs to be merged with the possessive pronouns page. While in a very broad sense, many parts of speech and structures can be seen as "adjectival", and while that may be of some use in explaining determiners in general, it's a barren argument that says the sentence "This is more my team than your team" means we should suddenly throw possessive determiners into the pool with all adjectives. You can (appear to) modify any determiner at all in such a way, or even nouns. "It's more me than you." "The one I like is more this team than that." "A rabbit is more (a) cat than (a) dog." It's a faulty proof that breaks down with other adverbs and other kinds of predicates, or even when you simply fill back in whatever preposition or adjective was ellipted.
Anyway, my issue here is the line, "Possessive determiners always imply the article the." I agree that they they always imply "some determinative element", but it's certainly not always 'the'. A possessive structure can be re-analysed with equal facility using indefinite articles or non-definite demonstratives such as "whatever". If I have two cars, and you know I do, I can still choose refer to only one of them as "my car" without necessarily needing to define it in any way, though you may very well respond by asking me for definition: "Which car?" (This response, of course, would prove that I had just treated the possessive pronoun indefinitely.) Bravo-Alpha ( talk) 23:44, 15 February 2011 (UTC)
I agree with certain others here that this re-classification of possessive determiners as "adjectives" is nonsensical, and that this page needs to be merged with the possessive pronouns page. Can we please work on fixing this? As long as we don't, this article will remain grotesque. (Though to me, "possessive" retains the notion of possession, which just isn't there with my headache, my birth, my preoccupation, my dilemma, my blood pressure and the rest. And ditto for "your dilemma is worse than mine", and so forth. So I'd prefer the less specific "genitive". Perhaps first merge to "possessive pronoun" and then consider renaming that to "genitive pronoun".) -- Hoary ( talk) 01:23, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
This was last addressed in 2011, and no improvements have been made since. I don't believe that there is any overlap between adjectives and determiners except that both modify nouns. As such, this section (Comparison with determiners and adjectives) needs to be deleted.
"mine" is a pronoun, not of "me" but "it" (or some other referant): it (which belongs to me). We both own cars. Mine is red = The car (that I own) is red. The red car is mine = The red car is the one (I own). Danielklein ( talk) 00:32, 13 December 2018 (UTC)
It seems that there is about one editor on this page who thinks that the article should be called "possessive adjective", and everybody else agrees that they are not adjectives. There are various options, but an immediate improvement would be to rename to "possessive determiner". If nobody objects, I will move the page. Count Truthstein ( talk) 19:11, 4 July 2012 (UTC)
While a couple of inconsistencies remain and the organization can be improved, I think this article has progressed in a positive direction. I support the choice of the terms possessive determiner (my, you, her, ...) and possessive pronoun (mine, yours, hers, ...).
I now reproduce Hoary's comment from the talk page for the article "Noun phrase", since the commentary belongs here rather than on that page. Hoary wrote:
"Well, we disagree in various ways. Those described in the last paragraph, though not strictly relevant to this article, are easiest to describe. "Arguing is a waste of time" -- is "arguing" within that sentence a noun or a verb? It can't be replaced by "write", but it can be replaced by "golf", and it therefore seems to have the distribution of a noun; yet most linguists call it a verb. So the form of the lexeme can determine its distribution, and thus the impossibility of *"Your must come over for dinner" doesn't mean that "your" can't be a pronoun. Assuming that you don't have in mind the production of new cases, I'm not quite sure what it means for English not to have a _productive_ case system, given that English can use the "'s" clitic for new words ("the app's best point"); but let's suppose that it indeed lacks one. How does this rule out case distinctions among "I, me, my, mine"? If "my" is "possessive", does this "possession" have lexical meaning, what with "my" birth, debt, regret, shame, gratitude, death (or indeed top, mind, fingers, toes, leg or grave), none of which I meaningfully "possess"? Etc etc. -- Hoary (talk) 08:02, 1 August 2012 (UTC)"
I would like to respond to a couple of points in this comment. I don't think that the observation about the distribution of gerunds such as "arguing" carries over to the distribution of possessive determiners. Possessive determiners distribute like other determiners in a clear and largely consistent manner in English.
I don't think the term genitive determiner or genitive pronoun is appropriate for these words in English. English lacks morphological case. Yes, there are vestiges of case in the language, but from a synchronic point of view, one really cannot argue that English has nominative or accusative or dative or genitive case. Possessive 's is a clitic; it is not a case marker like one finds in related languages such as German; it attaches to entire phrases, whereas case markers usually attach to nouns and/or to the pre-modifiers of nouns. Case markers in related languages are affixes, not clitics.
We also know that possessive determiners do not bare genitive case because in a related language such as German, these words can take case endings. Thus a form like dein- 'your' is inflected for gender, number, and CASE, which means that these words can appear bearing any of the various cases (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive). The determiner dein itself, however, really lacks case on its own taken out of context. From a synchronic point of view, there is nothing genitive about it.
Finally, I agree that the designation "possessive" is not really accurate. But I think it is the best that can be done given the options under consideration. Furthermore, I also think the designation "possessive" is really widespread. -- Tjo3ya ( talk) 17:47, 1 August 2012 (UTC)
What is the status of noun-derived possessives such as John's and the girl's? Are these also called possessive determiners (and/or possessive adjectives), or are they just phrases that have the same function? I'm going to add some mention of such forms to the article, but I would prefer it if we could say something based on sources (or at least someone's broad familiarity with sources). Victor Yus ( talk) 11:16, 19 August 2012 (UTC)
I've merged all the information from this article, as well as some from the former short articles on possessive pronouns and possessive case, into a single Possessive article (apart from some of the language-specific information, mostly about English, which I've placed at English possessive). That being done, I don't see any need to retain this article separately, unless someone plans to add significant amounts of information specifically about possessive determiners, which I don't currently see happening. Unless anyone has some reasoned objection, I plan to replace this article with a redirect to the general one, as I've already done with the short articles mentioned above. Victor Yus ( talk) 09:59, 23 August 2012 (UTC)
On the one hand, there isn't that much information in this article. On the other hand, it seems to me that is isn't obvious where to look in the article "Possessive" about possessive pronouns and the difference between possessive determiners and possessive pronouns. If they are merged then I think that the "possessive" article needs some work to be more accessible. At the moment I feel that this article is useful for readers looking for information on particular subjects.
I see that "Possessive pronoun" has been redirected to "possessive". It is inconsistent to have an article on possessive determiners and not one on possessive pronouns (meaning words such as "hers" as in "It is hers"), so it would make sense to merge this article. Another factor is that there are arguments that possessive determiners are pronouns, but also determiners - so merging into "English possessive" and "Possessive" would be better than merging them into a "possessive pronoun" article. It is probably not a problem to handle other possessive forms (not pronouns or determiners) in the same article, they can just be considered under a different sub-section.
So my feeling at the moment is that this article should be merged into other articles, but the other articles need some work before a redirect is made. Count Truthstein ( talk) 19:06, 27 August 2012 (UTC)
Hi Victor,
I have just read the article on possessives. I have a number of suggestions that may be helpful in the long run (but probably not in the short run). Above all, I think your work to improve the quality of Wikipedia articles is an important and valuable contribution.
The article on possessives has the following weaknesses, in my view: Too dense. Too many examples from too many various languages packed together in too tight of a space. The forms are not summarized in tables like they are in the possessive determiner article. Examples are not presented in a reader friendly manner; they are not set off from the text. The article overwhelms the reader. The article fails to begin slowly enough. It should focus primarily on English at first, branching out to other languages lower down.
The particular strength of the article is the section on terminology. That sort of summary of the inconsistent use of terminology is very valuable. The actual information in the article is also good, but as stated, I think it is too dense. It is going to overwhelm readers.
My preferred way of presenting this sort of information is to have one overarching article that then branches out into the related subphenomena. A good example of what I mean is the ellipsis article, which branches out into the various types of ellipsis (gapping, pseudogapping, noun ellipsis, etc.) and the discontinuity article, which branches out to the various types of discontinuites (scrambling, extraposition, topicalization, wh-fronting). The overview article can be less dense, allowing the details to be presented in the more specialized subpages. A bit of redundancy across the articles makes things less dense and thus more accessible. Consider working in a link to the article on noun ellipsis.
These suggestions may not be what you want to hear. In the big picture, I emphasize that I think your work is helpful and valuable. I will likely not challenge whatever you decide to do, although I may (or may not) decide to come in and rework some of what you've done at a later point. -- Tjo3ya ( talk) 05:08, 25 August 2012 (UTC)
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It requires more explanation: in finnish meidän means our [1] minun means my [2]
what part of speech are these words? Mrdthree 03:23, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
The result of the proposal was no consensus to move per the discussion below. Dekimasu よ! 10:27, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
Most linguists now recognize adjectives and determiners are separate word classes, and what we traditionally call possessive adjectives are actually possessive determiners. I think this article should be moved to the correct name. - TAKASUGI Shinji 23:15, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
In this edit, Takasugi Shinji reverts an edit of mine, saying they are not pronouns but adjectives, or more precisely, determiners.
They are not adjectives. If you think they're adjectives, please explain this, cite a linguistics authority, or both.
Yes they are indeed determiners. Determiners are not a subclass of adjectives.
They are called pronouns by a lot of authorities; not only ivory-tower (?) theoretical linguists but also three of the foremost descriptive grammars of the last century: Modern English Grammar (Jespersen), Comprehensive Grammar (Quirk et al.), Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (eds Huddleston and Pullum): see the notes to the article.
If anyone wants to call them determiners, that's fine with me. Anyone who wants to call them adjectives is merely attempting to perpetuate a very dated and obviously mistaken myth.
Incidentally, what is this "(its)" within the table? -- Hoary ( talk) 13:49, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
While it is possible to use its as a predicate adjective (The cat is angry because the bowl you're eating out of is its!) or as a pronoun meaning “that or those belonging to it” (Your notebook pages are torn. Borrow my notebook — its aren't), such use is rare and in most circumstances strained.
According to CGEL (p. 471) examples like the following are "very occasionally found":
What does not seem to exist is the "oblique genitive" usage: *The Bank is being sued by a rich client of its.
CapnPrep ( talk) 14:57, 23 January 2009 (UTC)
It cheated! My score was higher than its was!
I have a very tough time understanding the intro. It starts by claiming there's no such thing as possessive adjectives and then go on explaining what this nonexistent thing is by preparing a Dagwood sandwich of items whose relation to this nonexistent thing is obscure by a very precise perfection. What is it? Is it a colloquial waste basket term for expressing possession? The intro uses too many sub-clauses, if the sentences are split into sentences with just a few sub-clauses, then it might be comprehensible. ... said: Rursus ( bork²) 08:41, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
This article ( Possessive adjective) is currently devoted to denying the existence of its topic, and then providing all the content that should be in the other article ( Possessive pronoun). I don't care what you call it, but it should all be in one article. CapnPrep ( talk) 09:17, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
I am sad that this merger lost steam. Even in this article, we call these "[weak] possessive pronouns". It makes no sense for an encyclopedia to have one name used as a title and another used throughout the article. And since both possessive pronouns and possessive adjectives contain words that are referred to as possessive pronouns, it makes sense for them to be in a single article entitled possessive pronoun.
As far as it is now, I count two votes for the merge. And I will add mine. I vote Merge. — trlkly 08:47, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
Whether or not the articles are merged, someone needs to sort out the problem whereby the article is titled "possessive adjective" and yet says in the first sentence that this nomenclature is "mistaken". 81.129.130.254 ( talk) 00:11, 15 December 2009 (UTC).
Possessive pronoun has almost nothing in it, and everything I could imagine adding to it is either already here in Possessive adjective, or would be equally relevant here. What we need (I think) is:
CapnPrep ( talk) 15:37, 22 December 2009 (UTC)
Possessive shows:
I suggest we need a Possessive (grammar) article which can serve as the lead article for all the possessive grammar related articles as well as the defining article for those topics which don't need their own article. P.S. I also did a bunch of updates to this article to try to make it more understandable. Facts707 ( talk) 18:29, 27 February 2010 (UTC)
Talk of the apostrophe revives my weak interest in this matter of genitive pronouns. (Previously, I'd only wanted to ensure that the article didn't give misinformation.) Of course the "possessive s" of a noun phrase in English is a clitic -- it's not *the Queen's of Sheba nose; and in the Queen of Sheba's nose, it's the Queen's nose, not Sheba's. Now, it's OK in some lects, perhaps most or even all, to talk of (perhaps while pointing to) him in the red jacket. So how about Him in the red jacket's gun is loaded? This sounds very odd to me but I'd hesitate to rule that it's completely unacceptable. If it is acceptable, it doesn't alter the fact that the genitive form of him is his, but it might call for careful phrasing.
Incidentally, while I can say That sister of mine's off sick, I can't contract the "is" in That brother of his is off in Sikkim. -- Hoary ( talk) 02:12, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
In an ecumenical mood I rebelled against my Minimalist doctrine and looked in a couple of surveys of English grammar with very different theoretical underpinnings.
Lynn M. Berk's
says its blurb (and thus the whopping exaggeration of the last bit). Oxford UP, 1999; ISBN 0-19-512353-0. According to Berk, my, mine and so forth are "genitive forms" of "personal pronouns" (p.83).
R M W Dixon's A Semantic Approach to English Grammar
says its blurb. Oxford UP, 2005; ISBN 0-19-924740-4. According to Dixon, these (with them and so forth) are again "pronouns"; among pronouns, my and mine are respectively "possessors" as "modifier" and "NP head" (p.20).
Feel free to add your own. However, these should be published by university presses or comparable firms (Blackwell, Norton) and for university students of linguistics, not stuff for high school kids or for the nervous consumers of books purporting to help them to avoid misteaks and to rite good. -- Hoary ( talk) 05:05, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
I don't think the table of possessive forms for German and French is correct. It should explain why the genetive and dative cases respectively are quoted for personal pronouns in these languages, and why the accusative is given for English. I think the page should be merged as suggested by Wikipedia with English possessive pronouns. The cases for other languages should be cited either in the Wikidepida site for that language or in the corresponding page on the English language site which explains the case. (I will attempt to do this if there are no objections). Bewp ( talk) 19:05, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
It seems unfortunate to me that the phrase "boka mi" ("my book") was chosen as the example to illustrate possessives in Norwegian, since the Japanese "boku no" is used as an example immediately afterward. A reader who is not proficient in languages might assume that "boku no" also has something to do with books, since the phrases look so similar. I do realize that the translation of "boku no" follows the Japanese in parentheses, but I still think it's a bad idea to have all those book/bok words in a row when they mean completely different things. Thus I recommend putting a different noun in the Norwegian example so that a user can keep track of the possessive forms that the entry is actually talking about. I don't know Norwegian so I can't make a suggestion, but no doubt there is another simple noun that can serve as a substitute -- shirt, house, cat, or what have you. -- Hapax ( talk) 20:11, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
I propose renaming this article to Possessive determiner, explaining that "possessive adjective" is an alternative name, but using the term "possessive determiner" throughout the body of the article. 81.151.230.144 ( talk) 15:20, 22 December 2009 (UTC). (I just noticed that this was previously proposed but rejected, but I think sufficient time has passed for another discussion to be in order.)
(Bouncing left) Somebody's added a link to the entry for "my" in Merriam-Webster something or other. This indeed calls these things adjectives. But that's a dictionary, not a grammar. (And a stunningly unthinking dictionary, it would seem.) I don't know of any informed, intelligent grammatical analysis that calls them adjectives (and I looked, too). ¶ The majority of analyses call them pronouns (or personal pronouns). ¶ The next question is of what (personal) pronouns are. With a Minimalist analysis, they (together with these, the, etc) are determiners. But plenty of grammarians (and most descriptive grammars, such as CGEL) would call "the book", "my book" etc not DP but NP. While this article, or its successor, should give the DP analysis, I now think that simply calling them determiners would blatantly violate NPOV. (Incidentally, CGEL calls "my" etc "determinatives", saying that they may have the function of "determiner".) ¶ This is all getting complex, so pronouns they should be. Somebody could reasonably claim that the article should cover words in other languages that are semantically similar to the pronouns of English but syntactically (quasi-) adjectival. If we went along with this, we could subsume them under the broader term "pronominals". However, while this could be done, I don't see any compelling reason for doing it. And the faction (visible some way above on this very talk page) that's keen not to have accuracy disturb readers' comfortable misunderstandings would be tiresomely outraged by "pronominal". As pronouns are a broad and somewhat fuzzy category ("whosoever", "each other", etc), I recommend personal pronoun for I, me, my, mine, myself, etc. --
Hoary (
talk) 08:59, 5 January 2010 (UTC) .... deletion
Hoary (
talk)
02:40, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
It won't make sense to have the 2 together. They are 2 different things. There will be 2 much confusion, 2. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.7.203.167 ( talk) 20:52, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
I agree with certain others here that this re-classification of possessive determiners as "adjectives" is nonsensical, and that this page needs to be merged with the possessive pronouns page. While in a very broad sense, many parts of speech and structures can be seen as "adjectival", and while that may be of some use in explaining determiners in general, it's a barren argument that says the sentence "This is more my team than your team" means we should suddenly throw possessive determiners into the pool with all adjectives. You can (appear to) modify any determiner at all in such a way, or even nouns. "It's more me than you." "The one I like is more this team than that." "A rabbit is more (a) cat than (a) dog." It's a faulty proof that breaks down with other adverbs and other kinds of predicates, or even when you simply fill back in whatever preposition or adjective was ellipted.
Anyway, my issue here is the line, "Possessive determiners always imply the article the." I agree that they they always imply "some determinative element", but it's certainly not always 'the'. A possessive structure can be re-analysed with equal facility using indefinite articles or non-definite demonstratives such as "whatever". If I have two cars, and you know I do, I can still choose refer to only one of them as "my car" without necessarily needing to define it in any way, though you may very well respond by asking me for definition: "Which car?" (This response, of course, would prove that I had just treated the possessive pronoun indefinitely.) Bravo-Alpha ( talk) 23:44, 15 February 2011 (UTC)
I agree with certain others here that this re-classification of possessive determiners as "adjectives" is nonsensical, and that this page needs to be merged with the possessive pronouns page. Can we please work on fixing this? As long as we don't, this article will remain grotesque. (Though to me, "possessive" retains the notion of possession, which just isn't there with my headache, my birth, my preoccupation, my dilemma, my blood pressure and the rest. And ditto for "your dilemma is worse than mine", and so forth. So I'd prefer the less specific "genitive". Perhaps first merge to "possessive pronoun" and then consider renaming that to "genitive pronoun".) -- Hoary ( talk) 01:23, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
This was last addressed in 2011, and no improvements have been made since. I don't believe that there is any overlap between adjectives and determiners except that both modify nouns. As such, this section (Comparison with determiners and adjectives) needs to be deleted.
"mine" is a pronoun, not of "me" but "it" (or some other referant): it (which belongs to me). We both own cars. Mine is red = The car (that I own) is red. The red car is mine = The red car is the one (I own). Danielklein ( talk) 00:32, 13 December 2018 (UTC)
It seems that there is about one editor on this page who thinks that the article should be called "possessive adjective", and everybody else agrees that they are not adjectives. There are various options, but an immediate improvement would be to rename to "possessive determiner". If nobody objects, I will move the page. Count Truthstein ( talk) 19:11, 4 July 2012 (UTC)
While a couple of inconsistencies remain and the organization can be improved, I think this article has progressed in a positive direction. I support the choice of the terms possessive determiner (my, you, her, ...) and possessive pronoun (mine, yours, hers, ...).
I now reproduce Hoary's comment from the talk page for the article "Noun phrase", since the commentary belongs here rather than on that page. Hoary wrote:
"Well, we disagree in various ways. Those described in the last paragraph, though not strictly relevant to this article, are easiest to describe. "Arguing is a waste of time" -- is "arguing" within that sentence a noun or a verb? It can't be replaced by "write", but it can be replaced by "golf", and it therefore seems to have the distribution of a noun; yet most linguists call it a verb. So the form of the lexeme can determine its distribution, and thus the impossibility of *"Your must come over for dinner" doesn't mean that "your" can't be a pronoun. Assuming that you don't have in mind the production of new cases, I'm not quite sure what it means for English not to have a _productive_ case system, given that English can use the "'s" clitic for new words ("the app's best point"); but let's suppose that it indeed lacks one. How does this rule out case distinctions among "I, me, my, mine"? If "my" is "possessive", does this "possession" have lexical meaning, what with "my" birth, debt, regret, shame, gratitude, death (or indeed top, mind, fingers, toes, leg or grave), none of which I meaningfully "possess"? Etc etc. -- Hoary (talk) 08:02, 1 August 2012 (UTC)"
I would like to respond to a couple of points in this comment. I don't think that the observation about the distribution of gerunds such as "arguing" carries over to the distribution of possessive determiners. Possessive determiners distribute like other determiners in a clear and largely consistent manner in English.
I don't think the term genitive determiner or genitive pronoun is appropriate for these words in English. English lacks morphological case. Yes, there are vestiges of case in the language, but from a synchronic point of view, one really cannot argue that English has nominative or accusative or dative or genitive case. Possessive 's is a clitic; it is not a case marker like one finds in related languages such as German; it attaches to entire phrases, whereas case markers usually attach to nouns and/or to the pre-modifiers of nouns. Case markers in related languages are affixes, not clitics.
We also know that possessive determiners do not bare genitive case because in a related language such as German, these words can take case endings. Thus a form like dein- 'your' is inflected for gender, number, and CASE, which means that these words can appear bearing any of the various cases (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive). The determiner dein itself, however, really lacks case on its own taken out of context. From a synchronic point of view, there is nothing genitive about it.
Finally, I agree that the designation "possessive" is not really accurate. But I think it is the best that can be done given the options under consideration. Furthermore, I also think the designation "possessive" is really widespread. -- Tjo3ya ( talk) 17:47, 1 August 2012 (UTC)
What is the status of noun-derived possessives such as John's and the girl's? Are these also called possessive determiners (and/or possessive adjectives), or are they just phrases that have the same function? I'm going to add some mention of such forms to the article, but I would prefer it if we could say something based on sources (or at least someone's broad familiarity with sources). Victor Yus ( talk) 11:16, 19 August 2012 (UTC)
I've merged all the information from this article, as well as some from the former short articles on possessive pronouns and possessive case, into a single Possessive article (apart from some of the language-specific information, mostly about English, which I've placed at English possessive). That being done, I don't see any need to retain this article separately, unless someone plans to add significant amounts of information specifically about possessive determiners, which I don't currently see happening. Unless anyone has some reasoned objection, I plan to replace this article with a redirect to the general one, as I've already done with the short articles mentioned above. Victor Yus ( talk) 09:59, 23 August 2012 (UTC)
On the one hand, there isn't that much information in this article. On the other hand, it seems to me that is isn't obvious where to look in the article "Possessive" about possessive pronouns and the difference between possessive determiners and possessive pronouns. If they are merged then I think that the "possessive" article needs some work to be more accessible. At the moment I feel that this article is useful for readers looking for information on particular subjects.
I see that "Possessive pronoun" has been redirected to "possessive". It is inconsistent to have an article on possessive determiners and not one on possessive pronouns (meaning words such as "hers" as in "It is hers"), so it would make sense to merge this article. Another factor is that there are arguments that possessive determiners are pronouns, but also determiners - so merging into "English possessive" and "Possessive" would be better than merging them into a "possessive pronoun" article. It is probably not a problem to handle other possessive forms (not pronouns or determiners) in the same article, they can just be considered under a different sub-section.
So my feeling at the moment is that this article should be merged into other articles, but the other articles need some work before a redirect is made. Count Truthstein ( talk) 19:06, 27 August 2012 (UTC)
Hi Victor,
I have just read the article on possessives. I have a number of suggestions that may be helpful in the long run (but probably not in the short run). Above all, I think your work to improve the quality of Wikipedia articles is an important and valuable contribution.
The article on possessives has the following weaknesses, in my view: Too dense. Too many examples from too many various languages packed together in too tight of a space. The forms are not summarized in tables like they are in the possessive determiner article. Examples are not presented in a reader friendly manner; they are not set off from the text. The article overwhelms the reader. The article fails to begin slowly enough. It should focus primarily on English at first, branching out to other languages lower down.
The particular strength of the article is the section on terminology. That sort of summary of the inconsistent use of terminology is very valuable. The actual information in the article is also good, but as stated, I think it is too dense. It is going to overwhelm readers.
My preferred way of presenting this sort of information is to have one overarching article that then branches out into the related subphenomena. A good example of what I mean is the ellipsis article, which branches out into the various types of ellipsis (gapping, pseudogapping, noun ellipsis, etc.) and the discontinuity article, which branches out to the various types of discontinuites (scrambling, extraposition, topicalization, wh-fronting). The overview article can be less dense, allowing the details to be presented in the more specialized subpages. A bit of redundancy across the articles makes things less dense and thus more accessible. Consider working in a link to the article on noun ellipsis.
These suggestions may not be what you want to hear. In the big picture, I emphasize that I think your work is helpful and valuable. I will likely not challenge whatever you decide to do, although I may (or may not) decide to come in and rework some of what you've done at a later point. -- Tjo3ya ( talk) 05:08, 25 August 2012 (UTC)
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