English possessive

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.

For nouns, noun phrases, and some pronouns, the possessive is generally formed with the suffix -'s, but in some cases just with the addition of an apostrophe to an existing s. This form is sometimes called the Saxon genitive, reflecting the suffix's derivation from Old English.^[1] 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; however, some linguists do not accept this view and regard the 's ending as either a phrasal affix, an edge affix, or a clitic, rather than as a case ending.

^ McArthur, Roshan; McArthur, Thomas Burns (2005). Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford University Press. Saxon Genitive. ISBN 9780192806376.

[1] McArthur, Roshan; McArthur, Thomas Burns (2005). Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford University Press. Saxon Genitive. ISBN 9780192806376.

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