Possessive determiner

Possessive determiners are determiners which express possession. Some traditional grammars of English refer to them as possessive adjectives, though they do not have the same syntactic distribution as bona fide adjectives.

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, and theirs that are used as possessive pronouns but not as determiners. Possessive determiners may also be taken to include possessive forms made from nouns, from other pronouns and from noun phrases, such as John's, the girl's, somebody's, the king of Spain's, when used to modify a following noun.

In many languages, possessive determiners are subject to agreement with the noun they modify, as in the French mon, ma, mes, respectively the masculine singular, feminine singular and plural forms corresponding to the English my.

Possessive determiners, as used in English and some other languages, imply the definite article. For example, my car implies the car of mine. (However, "This is the car I have" implies that it is the only car you have, whereas "This is my car" does not imply that to the same extent. Similarly, "my brother" can mean equally well "one of my brothers" as "the one brother I have".) It is not correct to precede possessives with an article (*the my car) or (in today's English) another definite determiner such as a demonstrative (*this my car), although they can combine with quantifiers in the same ways that the can (all my cars, my three cars, etc.; see English determiners). This is not the case in all languages; for example in Italian the possessive is usually preceded by another determiner such as an article, as in la mia macchina ("my car", literally "the my car").^{[citation needed]}

While some classify the words my, your, etc. as possessive adjectives, the differences noted above make others not consider them adjectives, at least not in English, and prefer possessive determiners. In some other languages, the equivalent parts of speech behave more like true adjectives, however.

The words my, your, etc., are sometimes classified, along with mine, yours, etc., as possessive pronouns or genitive pronouns, since they are the possessive (or genitive) forms of the ordinary personal pronouns I, you, etc. However, unlike most other pronouns, they do not behave grammatically as stand-alone nouns but instead qualify another noun, as in my book (contrasted with that's mine, for example, in which mine substitutes for a complete noun phrase such as my book). For that reason, other authors restrict the term "possessive pronoun" to the group of words mine, yours, etc., which replaces directly a noun or noun phrase.

Some authors who classify both sets of words as "possessive pronouns" or "genitive pronouns" apply the terms dependent/independent or weak/strong to refer, respectively, to my, your, etc., and mine, yours, etc. For example, under that scheme, my is termed a dependent possessive pronoun and mine an independent possessive pronoun.

In linguistic terminology, possessive forms are also referred to as ktetic forms since Latin: possessivus has its equivalent in Ancient Greek: κτητικός (ktētikós). The term ktetic is used in reference to ktetic (possessive) adjectives and also to other ktetic (possessive) forms, including names derived from ktetics (ktetic personal names).