Talk:Possessive determiner

message: 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)
thread_title: wilder adventures in genitive pronounland

message: 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
:English Syntax: From Word to Discourse is a clear and highly accessible descriptive grammar of English with a strong semantic and discourse/functional focus. [... It] provides a unique alternative to the formal, generative approach of other texts in the field.''
says its blurb (and thus the whopping exaggeration of the last bit). Oxford UP, 1999; . 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
:shows how grammar helps people communicate and looks at the ways grammar and meaning interrelate.''
says its blurb. Oxford UP, 2005; . 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)
thread_title: In an ecumenical mood. . . .

message: 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)
thread_title: Table of possessive forms

message: 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)
thread_title:  Unfortunate choice of example in "other languages" section 

message: 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)
thread_title:  You can't merge the 2 

message: 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)
replies: text: The wording is not great, and the statement is unsourced, but it is correct to say that English my corresponds to the. Your example illustrates that uniqueness (one of the properties associated with definiteness) is context- and speaker-dependent. This also works with the: "He poked me in the eye." "Which eye?" "I'll take the bus." "Which bus?" These examples do not prove that the can be indefinite; they show that definiteness is a more complicated notion than most people think. CapnPrep (talk) 13:52, 16 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comparison of determiners and adjectives 

message: 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)
replies: text: Thank you, Count. I'm still sure that "genitive" is better than "possessive", and that "pronoun" is more theory-neutral than "determiner"; but the previous use of "adjective" was an embarrassment. -- Hoary (talk) 00:29, 1 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article should be renamed 

message: 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)
thread_title: The article is basically good

message: 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)
thread_title: What about noun possessives?

message: 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)
thread_title: Suggestions

message: :To my mind neither of these points indicates anything wrong with the article. If you can improve the wording, please do, but it seems that anything we say about possessive determiners just needs to hold when they are considered as determiners; we don't need to keep repeating on every possible occasion that they are sometimes given other names. Probably better would be just to combine this article with Possessive, since there is no uniformity of terminology and no particular advantage in considering a particular type of possessive forms separately. W. P. Uzer (talk) 06:48, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, this article is unnecessary. The page is currently English-focused, which makes it redundant with English possessive, and barely covers general language possessives, should be covered in Possessive. I'd delete and merge the article into Possessive, which is a more general term, and seems to be a somewhat better article besides. 183.83.201.216 (talk) 09:19, 21 December 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: ...I hadn't noticed how long ago the original comment was. Wow. 183.83.201.216 (talk) 09:19, 21 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Improve