Possessive

A possessive or ktetic form (abbreviated POS or POSS; from Latin: possessivus; Ancient Greek: κτητικός, romanized: ktētikós) is a word or grammatical construction indicating a relationship of possession in a broad sense. This can include strict ownership, or a number of other types of relation to a greater or lesser degree analogous to it.

Most European languages feature possessive forms associated with personal pronouns, like the English my, mine, your, yours, his and so on. There are two main ways in which these can be used (and a variety of terminologies for each):

Some languages, including English, also have possessive forms derived from nouns or nominal phrases, such as Jane's, the cows' and nobody else's. These can be used in the same two ways as the pronoun-derived forms: Jane's office or that one is Jane's.

Possessives are sometimes regarded as a grammatical case (the possessive case), although they are also sometimes considered to represent the genitive case, or are not assigned to any case, depending on which language is being considered. On the other hand, some languages, such as the Cariban languages, can be said to have a possessed case, used to indicate the other party (the thing possessed) in a possession relationship. A similar feature found in some languages is the possessive affix, usually a suffix, added to the (possessed) noun to indicate the possessor, as in the Finnish taloni ("my house"), where talo means "house" and the suffix -ni means "my".

The concepts of possessive forms and genitive forms are sometimes conflated, although they are not exactly the same. The genitive form, which does not exist in modern English as a productive inflection outside of pronouns (see below), represents an of relationship, which may or may not be possessive; in other words, the possessive is a subset of genitive. For example, the genitive construction "speed of the car" is equivalent to the possessive form "the car's speed". However, the genitive construction "pack of dogs" is not the same as the possessive form "dogs' pack" (though it is the same as "dog pack", which is not possessive).

The personal pronouns of many languages correspond to both a set of possessive determiners and a set of possessive pronouns. For example, the English personal pronouns I, you, he, she, it, we and they correspond to the possessive determiners my, your, his, her, its, our and their and also to the (substantive) possessive pronouns mine, yours, his, hers, its (rare), ours and theirs. In some instances there is no difference in form between the determiner and the pronoun; examples include the English his (and its), and informal Finnish meidän (meaning either "our" or "ours").

In some languages, possessive determiners are subject to agreement with the noun they modify and possessive pronouns may be subject to agreement with their antecedent, in gender, number and case. For example, French has mon, ma, mes, respectively the masculine singular, feminine singular and plural forms corresponding to the English possessive determiner my, as well as the forms le mien, la mienne, les mien(ne)s corresponding to English possessive pronoun mine.

Since personal pronouns may also agree in number and gender with their own antecedent or referent, the possessive forms may consequently show agreement with either the "possessor" or the "possessed", or both. In French (and most other Romance languages) the third-person singular possessives do not indicate the gender of the possessor, instead they agree with the possessed (son, sa and ses can all mean "his", "her" or "its"). In Spanish the number is always indicated but the gender is only indicated for possessive pronouns, not possessive determiners; mi padre, mi madre, mis hermanos, mis hermanas (my father, my mother, my brothers, my sisters), but mío, mía, míos, mías when used as "mine" to refer to the previous. This contrasts with standard Dutch and English, where the form of the possessives (zijn, haar; his, her, its) indicates the grammatical or natural gender of the possessor, but does not depend on properties of the possessed. Additionally, German and several Dutch dialects additionally inflect their possessives, thus giving agreement with both possessor and possessed; German has sein and ihr meaning "his" and "her" respectively, but these inflect to give (for example) feminine forms like seine and ihre, depending on the gender (and number and case) of the thing possessed.