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82-477: 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

164-433: A the háza his-house Péternek a háza of-Peter the his-house Possessive determiners are used in combination with a noun, playing the role of a determiner or attributive adjective . In English and some other languages, the use of such a word implies the definite article . For example, my car implies the car that belongs to me or is used by me ; it is not correct to precede possessives with an article (*

246-795: A case ending (see below , and further at English possessive ). In languages that have a genitive case, the genitive form of a noun may sometimes be used as a possessive (as in German Karls Haus "Karl's house"). Languages such as Japanese and Chinese form possessive constructions with nouns using possessive particles, in the same way as described for pronouns above. An example from Japanese is: neko cat no PTCL iro color neko no iro cat PTCL color "the cat's color" In other languages, noun possessives must be formed periphrastically , as in French la plume de ma tante ("my aunt's pen", literally "the pen of my aunt"). In Hungarian ,

328-438: A grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns inherently carry one value of the grammatical category called gender . The values present in a given language, of which there are usually two or three, are called

410-511: 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

492-400: A bridge ( German : Brücke , f. ) more often used the words 'beautiful', 'elegant', 'pretty', and 'slender', while Spanish speakers, whose word for bridge is masculine ( puente , m. ), used 'big', 'dangerous', 'strong', and 'sturdy' more often. However, studies of this kind have been criticized on various grounds and yield an unclear pattern of results overall. A noun may belong to

574-401: A given class because of characteristic features of its referent , such as sex, animacy, shape, although in some instances a noun can be placed in a particular class based purely on its grammatical behavior. Some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", but others use different definitions for each. Many authors prefer "noun classes" when none of the inflections in

656-409: A group of mixed gender; these are dealt with according to the conventions of the language in question (in French, for example, the masculine ils "they" is used for a group containing both men and women or antecedents of both masculine and feminine gender). A pronoun can still carry gender even if it does not inflect for it; for example, in the French sentence je suis petit ("I am small") the speaker

738-445: A language relate to sex, such as when an animate –inanimate distinction is made. Note, however, that the word "gender" derives from Latin genus (also the root of genre ) which originally meant "kind", so it does not necessarily have a sexual meaning. A classifier, or measure word , is a word or morpheme used in some languages together with a noun, principally to enable numbers and certain other determiners to be applied to

820-462: A language which uses classifiers normally has a number of different ones, used with different sets of nouns. These sets depend largely on properties of the things that the nouns denote (for example, a particular classifier may be used for long thin objects, another for flat objects, another for people, another for abstracts, etc.), although sometimes a noun is associated with a particular classifier more by convention than for any obvious reason. However it

902-417: A noun manifests itself in two principal ways: in the modifications that the noun itself undergoes, and in modifications of other related words ( agreement ). Grammatical gender manifests itself when words related to a noun like determiners , pronouns or adjectives change their form ( inflect ) according to the gender of noun they refer to ( agreement ). The parts of speech affected by gender agreement,

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984-550: A similar pattern); German, where the third-person plural sie (capitalized as Sie ) is used as both singular and plural in the second person in non-familiar uses; and Polish, where the noun pan ("gentleman") and its feminine and plural equivalents are used as polite second-person pronouns. For more details, see T–V distinction . Some languages, such as Japanese , Korean and many Southeast Asian languages like Vietnamese , Thai , and Indonesian , have pronouns that reflect deep-seated societal categories. In these languages there

1066-457: A similar way, as in háza ("his/her house"), formed from ház ("house"). In Hungarian this affix can also be used when the possessor is represented by a full noun, as described in the next section. Pronouns other than personal pronouns, if they have possessive forms, are likely to form them in a similar way to nouns (see below). In English, for example, possessive forms derived from other pronouns include one's , somebody's and nobody's . There

1148-497: A system include later forms of Proto-Indo-European (see below ), Sanskrit , some Germanic languages , most Slavic languages , a few Romance languages ( Romanian , Asturian and Neapolitan ), Marathi , Latin , and Greek . Here nouns that denote animate things (humans and animals) generally belong to one gender, and those that denote inanimate things to another (although there may be some deviation from that principle). Examples include earlier forms of Proto-Indo-European and

1230-527: A way that sounds like the masculine declensions in South-Eastern Norwegian dialects. The same does not apply to Swedish common gender, as the declensions follow a different pattern from both the Norwegian written languages. Norwegian Nynorsk , Norwegian Bokmål and most spoken dialects retain masculine, feminine and neuter even if their Scandinavian neighbors have lost one of the genders. As shown,

1312-485: Is a third available gender, so nouns with sexless or unspecified-sex referents may be either masculine, feminine, or neuter. There are also certain exceptional nouns whose gender does not follow the denoted sex, such as the German Mädchen , meaning "girl", which is neuter. This is because it is actually a diminutive of "Magd" and all diminutive forms with the suffix -chen are neuter. Examples of languages with such

1394-529: Is also found in Dravidian languages . (See below .) It has been shown that grammatical gender causes a number of cognitive effects. For example, when native speakers of gendered languages are asked to imagine an inanimate object speaking, whether its voice is male or female tends to correspond to the grammatical gender of the object in their language. This has been observed for speakers of Spanish, French, and German, among others. Caveats of this research include

1476-515: Is also possible for a given noun to be usable with any of several classifiers; for example, the Mandarin Chinese classifier 个 ( 個 ) gè is frequently used as an alternative to various more specific classifiers. Grammatical gender can be realized as inflection and can be conditioned by other types of inflection, especially number inflection, where the singular-plural contrast can interact with gender inflection. The grammatical gender of

1558-613: Is assigned to one of the genders, and few or no nouns can occur in more than one gender. Gender is considered an inherent quality of nouns, and it affects the forms of other related words, a process called "agreement" . Nouns may be considered the "triggers" of the process, whereas other words will be the "target" of these changes. These related words can be, depending on the language: determiners , pronouns , numerals , quantifiers , possessives , adjectives , past and passive participles , articles , verbs , adverbs , complementizers , and adpositions . Gender class may be marked on

1640-1019: Is common for free pronouns to be reserved exclusively for human (and sometimes other animate) referents . Examples of languages with animacy restrictions on free pronouns include Wanyjirra , Bilinarra , Warrongo , Guugu Yimidhirr and many others. Bound pronouns can take a variety of forms, including verbal prefixes (these are usually subject markers —see Bardi —but can mark objects as well—see Guniyandi ), verbal enclitics (including possessive markers) and auxiliary morphemes. These various forms are exemplified below: Nyimu-lu dog- ERG palu-nya 3 - ABS patjar-nu bite- PST Nyimu-lu palu-nya patjar-nu dog-ERG 3-ABS bite-PST 'The dog bit it' i - 3 - ng- PST - jalgoo fall -ij - PFV i - ng- jalgoo -ij 3 - PST- fall -PFV 'he/she/it fell.' ngunhi =lu=na gave = 3 . ERG = 3 . ABS ngadhi 1SG . OBL ngunhi =lu=na ngadhi Natural gender In linguistics ,

1722-463: Is done using the ending -'s , as in Jane's , heaven's , the boy's , those young men's , or sometimes just an apostrophe, as in workers', Jesus', the soldiers'. Note that the ending can be added at the end of a noun phrase even when the phrase does not end with its head noun, as in the king of England's ; this property inclines many linguists towards the view that the ending is a clitic rather than

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1804-555: Is generally a small set of nouns that refer to the discourse participants, but these referential nouns are not usually used ( pronoun avoidance ), with proper nouns, deictics, and titles being used instead (and once the topic is understood, usually no explicit reference is made at all). A speaker chooses which word to use depending on the rank, job, age, gender, etc. of the speaker and the addressee. For instance, in Japanese, in formal situations, adults usually refer to themselves as watashi or

1886-515: Is generally limited to such adverbs as more , less , or as much ... as ( comparative ) or mostly ( superlative ), for example in This is more my team than your team and This is mostly my team . Substantive possessive pronouns are used on their own and cannot be used to describe a noun, playing the role of noun phrases , so mine may stand for "my cat", "my sister", "my things", etc. In some languages these may require articles or other determiners, as

1968-569: Is however a distinct form whose for the possessive of the interrogative and relative pronoun who ; other languages may have similarly functioning words, such as the Russian чей chey ("whose?"). Another possessive found in Russian and other Slavic languages is the reflexive possessive, corresponding to the general reflexive pronoun ; the Russian form is свой svoj (meaning "one's (own)", "my (own)", etc.). In some languages, possessives can be formed from nouns or nominal phrases . In English, this

2050-445: Is male and so the pronoun je is masculine, whereas in je suis petite the speaker is female and the pronoun is treated as feminine, the feminine ending -e consequently being added to the predicate adjective. On the other hand, many languages do not distinguish female and male in the third person pronoun. Some languages have or had a non-gender-specific third person pronoun: Some of these languages started to distinguish gender in

2132-418: Is masculine (meaning "lake") its genitive singular form is Sees , but when it is feminine (meaning "sea"), the genitive is See , because feminine nouns do not take the genitive -s . Gender is sometimes reflected in other ways. In Welsh , gender marking is mostly lost on nouns; however, Welsh has initial mutation , where the first consonant of a word changes into another in certain conditions. Gender

2214-470: Is more common to say you should hold your oar in both hands . In many languages, personal pronouns, particularly those of the third person, differ depending on the gender of their antecedent or referent. This occurs in English with the third-person singular pronouns, where (simply put) he is used when referring to a man, she to a woman, singular they to a person whose gender is unknown or unspecified at

2296-430: Is not enough to constitute a gender system. In other languages, the division into genders usually correlates to some degree, at least for a certain set of nouns, such as those denoting humans, with some property or properties of the things that particular nouns denote. Such properties include animacy or inanimacy, " humanness " or non-humanness, and biological sex . However, in most languages, this semantic division

2378-448: 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

2460-416: Is one of the factors that can cause one form of mutation (soft mutation). For instance, the word merch "girl" changes into ferch after the definite article . This only occurs with feminine singular nouns: mab "son" remains unchanged. Adjectives are affected by gender in a similar way. Additionally, in many languages, gender is often closely correlated with the basic unmodified form ( lemma ) of

2542-401: Is only partially valid, and many nouns may belong to a gender category that contrasts with their meaning, e.g. the word for "manliness" could be of feminine gender, as it is in French with "la masculinité" and "la virilité". In such a case, the gender assignment can also be influenced by the morphology or phonology of the noun, or in some cases can be apparently arbitrary. Usually each noun

Possessive - Misplaced Pages Continue

2624-415: Is reserved for abstract concepts derived from adjectives: such as lo bueno , lo malo ("that which is good/bad"). Natural gender refers to the biological sex of most animals and people, while grammatical gender refers to certain phonetic characteristics (the sounds at the end, or beginning) of a noun. Among other lexical items, the definite article changes its form according to this categorization. In

2706-421: Is something other than the default the implied in the usual possessive determiner. The terminology used for possessive words and phrases is not consistent among all grammarians and linguists . What some authors refer to as possessives , others may call genitives , and vice versa. Nowadays, however, the term genitive is most commonly used in relation to languages with a developed case system (in which

2788-634: Is the possessive particle. Similarly in Mandarin Chinese , "my" or "mine" is wǒ de , where wǒ means "I" and de is the possessive particle. An alternative to the pronominal possessive determiner, found in some languages, including Finnish and Hungarian , is the possessive affix , usually a suffix, attached to the noun denoting the thing possessed. For example, in Finnish the suffix -ni means "my", producing forms such as taloni ("my house"), from talo ("house"). Hungarian possessive suffixes are used in

2870-545: Is true of both German and English, and also of the Romance languages , which (with the exception of Romanian ) have lost the Latin grammatical case for nouns, but preserve certain distinctions in the personal pronouns. Other syntactic types of pronouns which may adopt distinct forms are disjunctive pronouns , used in isolation and in certain distinct positions (such as after a conjunction like and ), and prepositional pronouns , used as

2952-410: Is used here purely to signify the grammatical sense; personal pronouns are not limited to people and can also refer to animals and objects (as the English personal pronoun it usually does). The re-use in some languages of one personal pronoun to indicate a second personal pronoun with formality or social distance – commonly a second person plural to signify second person singular formal – is known as

3034-426: Is usually feminine), or may be arbitrary. In a few languages, the assignment of any particular noun (i.e., nominal lexeme, that set of noun forms inflectable from a common lemma) to one grammatical gender is solely determined by that noun's meaning, or attributes, like biological sex, humanness, or animacy. However, the existence of words that denote male and female, such as the difference between "aunt" and "uncle"

3116-547: The T–V distinction , from the Latin pronouns tu and vos . Examples are the majestic plural in English and the use of vous in place of tu in French . For specific details of the personal pronouns used in the English language , see English personal pronouns . Pronoun is a category of words. A pro-form is a type of function word or expression that stands in for (expresses

3198-431: The genders of that language. Whereas some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", others use different definitions for each. Many authors prefer "noun classes" when none of the inflections in a language relate to sex or gender . According to one estimate, gender is used in approximately half of the world's languages . According to one definition: "Genders are classes of nouns reflected in

3280-466: The subject of a verb, from the oblique form ( me , you , him , her , it , us , them ), used principally as the object of a verb or preposition. Languages whose nouns inflect for case often inflect their pronouns according to the same case system; for example, German personal pronouns have distinct nominative, genitive, dative and accusative forms ( ich , meiner , mir , mich ; etc.). Pronouns often retain more case distinctions than nouns – this

3362-455: The "genitive case" often has a wider range of functions than merely forming possessives), while in languages like English, such words are usually called possessives rather than genitives. A given language may have distinct genitive and possessive forms, as in the example of Russian given above. (The English possessive in -'s is sometimes called the Saxon genitive ; this alludes to its derivation from

Possessive - Misplaced Pages Continue

3444-540: 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

3526-455: The "triggers" of the process, because they have an inherent gender, whereas related words that change their form to match the gender of the noun can be considered the "target" of these changes. These related words can be, depending on the language: determiners , pronouns , numerals , quantifiers , possessives , adjectives , past and passive participles , verbs , adverbs , complementizers , and adpositions . Gender class may be marked on

3608-574: 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

3690-417: The French le mien etc. In English, the -'s possessives formed from nouns or noun phrases can be used in the same way; the president's may stand for "the president's office", "the president's policies", etc., as determined by the context. A related use is that of the predicative expression , as in sentences like the book is mine . Here mine may be considered to be a predicate adjective (like red in

3772-408: The behavior of associated words." Languages with grammatical gender usually have two to four different genders, but some are attested with up to 20. Common gender divisions include masculine and feminine; masculine, feminine, and neuter; or animate and inanimate. Depending on the language and the word, this assignment might bear some relationship with the meaning of the noun (e.g. "woman"

3854-410: The book is red ) rather than a pronoun; in English, however, the same possessive form is used. Other languages may use differing forms; for example French may use ...est à moi for "...is mine". A particular use of possessive pronouns and noun forms in English is that illustrated in phrases like a friend of mine and that coat of Fred's , used to form possessive expressions when the desired determiner

3936-400: The circumstances in which it occurs, and the way words are marked for gender vary between languages. Gender inflection may interact with other grammatical categories like number or case . In some languages the declension pattern followed by the noun itself will be different for different genders. The gender of a noun may affect the modifications that the noun itself undergoes, particularly

4018-897: The complement of a preposition. Some languages have strong and weak forms of personal pronouns, the former being used in positions with greater stress . Some authors further distinguish weak pronouns from clitic pronouns, which are phonetically less independent. Examples are found in Polish, where the masculine third-person singular accusative and dative forms are jego and jemu (strong) and go and mu (weak). English has strong and weak pronunciations for some pronouns, such as them (pronounced /ðɛm/ when strong, but /ðəm/ , /ɛm/ , /əm/ or even /m̩/ when weak). Some languages—for instance, most Australian Aboriginal languages —have distinct classes of free and bound pronouns. These are distinguished by their morphological independence/dependence on other words respectively. In Australian languages, it

4100-429: The construction Mária háza is used ("Maria's house", literally "Maria her house", where the final -a in háza is the possessive suffix meaning "her"). The possessor noun can carry an additional dative marker, in which case an article appears before the noun. For example, "Peter's house" may be translated either as: Péter Peter háza his-house Péter háza Peter his-house Péternek of-Peter

4182-782: The earliest family known to have split off from it, the extinct Anatolian languages (see below ). Modern examples include Algonquian languages such as Ojibwe . Here a masculine–feminine–neuter system previously existed, but the distinction between masculine and feminine genders has been lost in nouns (they have merged into what is called common gender ), though not in pronouns that can operate under natural gender. Thus nouns denoting people are usually of common gender, whereas other nouns may be of either gender. Examples include Danish and Swedish (see Gender in Danish and Swedish ), and to some extent Dutch (see Gender in Dutch grammar ). The dialect of

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4264-481: The effect for German speakers has also led to a proposal that the effect is restricted to languages with a two-gender system, possibly because such languages are inclined towards a greater correspondence between grammatical and natural gender. Another kind of test asks people to describe a noun, and attempts to measure whether it takes on gender-specific connotations depending on the speaker's native language. For example, one study found that German speakers describing

4346-472: The even more polite watakushi , while young men may use the student-like boku and police officers may use honkan ("this officer"). In informal situations, women may use the colloquial atashi , and men may use the rougher ore . Pronouns also often take different forms based on their syntactic function, and in particular on their grammatical case . English distinguishes the nominative form ( I , you , he , she , it , we , they ), used principally as

4428-682: The first use of possessive as a noun occurs in 1591, the first use of possessive case (which notes that it is like the Latin genitive, and may be called the genitive case in reference to English also) occurs in 1763, and the first use of possessive adjective dates from 1870. Personal pronoun Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as I ), second person (as you ), or third person (as he , she , it ). Personal pronouns may also take different forms depending on number (usually singular or plural), grammatical or natural gender , case , and formality. The term "personal"

4510-447: The gender (and number and case) of the thing possessed. In languages that have a genitive case , the possessive forms corresponding to pronouns may or may not resemble the genitive of those pronouns. For example, in Russian , the genitive of я ja "I" is меня menya ("of me"), whereas the corresponding possessive is мой moy ("my, mine", in masculine singular nominative form). In German

4592-487: The genitive case that existed in Old English . It may also be called the prenominal genitive ; this also applies to analogous forms in languages such as German.) Words like the English my and your have traditionally been called possessive adjectives . However, modern linguists note that they behave more like determiners rather than true adjectives (see examples in the § Syntax section above), and thus prefer

4674-487: The inanimate pronoun it to refer to a person (except in some cases to a small child), and although it is traditional to use the masculine he to refer to a person of unspecified gender, the movement towards gender-neutral language requires that another method be found, such as saying he or she . A common solution, particularly in informal language, is to use singular they . For more details see Gender in English . Similar issues arise in some languages when referring to

4756-415: 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

4838-747: The merger of masculine and feminine in these languages and dialects can be considered a reversal of the original split in Proto-Indo-European (see below ). Some gender contrasts are referred to as classes ; for some examples, see Noun class . In some of the Slavic languages , for example, within the masculine and sometimes feminine and neuter genders, there is a further division between animate and inanimate nouns—and in Polish , also sometimes between nouns denoting humans and non-humans. (For details, see below .) A human–non-human (or "rational–non-rational") distinction

4920-571: The my car ) or other 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") or quel tuo libro ("that book of yours", literally "that your book"). Some languages place

5002-438: The noun itself, but can also be marked on other constituents in a noun phrase or sentence. If the noun is explicitly marked, both trigger and target may feature similar alternations. As an example, we consider Spanish , a language with two gender categories: "natural" vs "grammatical". "Natural" gender can be masculine or feminine, while "grammatical" gender can be masculine, feminine, or neuter. This third, or "neuter" gender

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5084-1022: The noun itself, but will also always be marked on other constituents in a noun phrase or sentence. If the noun is explicitly marked, both trigger and target may feature similar alternations. Three possible functions of grammatical gender include: Moreover, grammatical gender may serve to distinguish homophones. It is a quite common phenomenon in language development for two phonemes to merge, thereby making etymologically distinct words sound alike. In languages with gender distinction, however, these word pairs may still be distinguishable by their gender. For example, French pot ("pot") and peau ("skin") are homophones /po/ , but disagree in gender: le pot vs. la peau . Common systems of gender contrast include: Nouns that denote specifically male persons (or animals) are normally of masculine gender; those that denote specifically female persons (or animals) are normally of feminine gender; and nouns that denote something that does not have any sex, or do not specify

5166-455: The noun, and sometimes a noun can be modified to produce (for example) masculine and feminine words of similar meaning. See § Form-based morphological criteria , below. Agreement , or concord, is a grammatical process in which certain words change their form so that values of certain grammatical categories match those of related words. Gender is one of the categories which frequently require agreement. In this case, nouns may be considered

5248-604: The noun. They are not regularly used in English or other European languages, although they parallel the use of words such as piece(s) and head in phrases like "three pieces of paper" or "thirty head of cattle". They are a prominent feature of East Asian languages , where it is common for all nouns to require a classifier when being quantified—for example, the equivalent of "three people" is often "three classifier people". A more general type of classifier ( classifier handshapes ) can be found in sign languages . Classifiers can be considered similar to genders or noun classes, in that

5330-551: The old Norwegian capital Bergen also uses common gender and neuter exclusively. The common gender in Bergen and in Danish is inflected with the same articles and suffixes as the masculine gender in Norwegian Bokmål . This makes some obviously feminine noun phrases like "a cute girl", "the well milking cow" or "the pregnant mares" sound strange to most Norwegian ears when spoken by Danes and people from Bergen since they are inflected in

5412-456: The plurals ils and elles ). Sometimes natural and grammatical gender do not coincide, as with the German noun Mädchen ("girl"), which is grammatically neuter but naturally feminine. (See Grammatical gender § Grammatical vs. natural gender for more details.) Issues may arise when the referent is someone of unspecified or unknown gender. In a language such as English, it is derogatory to use

5494-517: The possessive after the noun, as in Norwegian boka mi ("my book"). Here again the equivalent of the definite article – in this case the definite ending -a on the noun bok – is used in addition to the possessive. However, the forms min bok or mi bok , where the noun bok is in the indefinite form, are equally correct. Possessive determiners may be modified with an adverb , as adjectives are, although not as freely or as commonly. Such modification

5576-458: The possibility of subjects' "using grammatical gender as a strategy for performing the task", and the fact that even for inanimate objects the gender of nouns is not always random. For example, in Spanish, female gender is often attributed to objects that are "used by women, natural, round, or light" and male gender to objects "used by men, artificial, angular, or heavy." Apparent failures to reproduce

5658-559: 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

5740-427: The same content as) another word , phrase , clause or sentence where the meaning is recoverable from the context. Pronouns mostly function as pro-forms, but there are pronouns that are not pro-forms and pro-forms that are not pronouns. In [1], the pronoun it "stands in" for whatever was mentioned and is a good idea. In [2], the pronoun it doesn't stand in for anything. No other word can function there with

5822-1118: The same meaning; we don't say "the sky is raining" or "the weather is raining". So, it is a pronoun but not a pro-form. Finally, in [3], did so is a verb phrase, not a pronoun, but it is a pro-form standing for "help". Languages typically have personal pronouns for each of the three grammatical persons : As noted above, within each person there are often different forms for different grammatical numbers , especially singular and plural. Languages which have other numbers, such as dual (e.g. Slovene ), may also have distinct pronouns for these. Some languages distinguish between inclusive and exclusive first-person plural pronouns – those that do and do not include their audience. For example, Tok Pisin has seven first-person pronouns according to number (singular, dual, trial, plural) and clusivity, such as mitripela ("they two and I") and yumitripela ("you two and I"). Some languages do not have third-person personal pronouns, instead using demonstratives (e.g. Macedonian ) or full noun phrases. Latin used demonstratives rather than third-person pronouns (in fact

5904-471: 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

5986-424: 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 "

6068-424: The second person, depending on the degree of formality or familiarity. It is common for different pronouns to be used when addressing friends, family, children and animals than when addressing superiors and adults with whom the speaker is less familiar. Examples of such languages include French, where the singular tu is used only for familiars, the plural vous being used as a singular in other cases (Russian follows

6150-563: The sex of their referent, have come to belong to one or other of the genders, in a way that may appear arbitrary. Examples of languages with such a system include most of the modern Romance languages , the Baltic languages , the Celtic languages , some Indo-Aryan languages (e.g., Hindi ), and the Afroasiatic languages . This is similar to systems with a masculine–feminine contrast, except that there

6232-618: The term possessive determiner . In some other languages, however, the equivalent words behave more like true adjectives (compare the Italian example above, for instance). While for most authors the term possessive pronoun is reserved (as in this article) for possessives like mine and yours that do not qualify an explicit noun, the term is sometimes taken also to include all possessive forms that correspond to pronouns even though they behave as determiners. Some authors who classify both sets of words as possessive pronouns or genitive pronouns apply

6314-453: The terms dependent/independent, weak/strong or adjectival/substantival to refer, respectively, to my , your , etc. and mine , yours , etc. Thus my is termed a dependent (or weak or adjectival ) possessive pronoun , while mine is an independent (or strong or substantival ) possessive pronoun . According to the OED , the first reference to possessive pronouns is found in 1530;

6396-525: The third person pronoun due to influence from European languages. Mandarin , for example, introduced, in the early 20th century a different character for she (她), which is pronounced identically as he (他) and thus is still indistinguishable in speech (tā). Korean geunyeo (그녀) is found in writing to translate "she" from European languages. In the spoken language it still sounds awkward and rather unnatural, as it literally translates to "that female". Many languages have different pronouns, particularly in

6478-423: The third-person pronouns in the Romance languages are descended from the Latin demonstratives). In some cases personal pronouns can be used in place of indefinite pronouns , referring to someone unspecified or to people generally. In English and other languages the second-person pronoun can be used in this way: instead of the formal one should hold one's oar in both hands (using the indefinite pronoun one ), it

6560-418: The time that the pronoun is being used or to a person who does not identify as either a man or a woman, and it to something inanimate or an animal of unspecific sex. This is an example of pronoun selection based on natural gender; many languages also have selection based on grammatical gender (as in French , where the pronouns il and elle are used with masculine and feminine antecedents respectively, as are

6642-592: The two sets of forms are quite similar (for example, the genitive of ich "I" is meiner , the corresponding possessive pronoun is also meiner in the masculine singular nominative, and the possessive determiner is mein with various endings). Some languages have no distinct possessive determiners as such, instead using a pronoun together with a possessive particle – a grammatical particle used to indicate possession. For example, in Japanese , "my" or "mine" can be expressed as watashi no , where watashi means "I" and no

6724-407: The way in which the noun inflects for number and case . For example, a language like Latin , German or Russian has a number of different declension patterns, and which pattern a particular noun follows may be highly correlated with its gender. For some instances of this, see Latin declension . A concrete example is provided by the German word See , which has two possible genders: when it

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