Possessive pronouns

 

A possessive pronoun is a part of speech that attributes ownership to someone or something. Like any other pronoun, it substitutes a noun phrase and can prevent its repetition. For example, in the phrase, "These glasses are mine, not yours", the words "mine" and "yours" are possessive pronouns and stand for "my glasses" and "your glasses," respectively.

SUBJECT                                POSSESSIVE PRONOUN

I                                                Mine

We                                            Ours

You                                           Yours

He                                             His

She                                            Hers

It                                               *We don't use its as a possessive pronoun

They                                          Theirs

Examples

• This is my laptop. It’s mine.
• These books are mine, not yours.
• This is my brother ‘s book. It’s his.
• He offered to swap his camera for hers.
• I’ll show you to your room. Ours is next door.
• The ship is theirs.

Possessive ’s

We use apostrophe s (’s), also called possessive ’s, as a determiner to show that something belongs to someone or something:

- Is that Olivia’s bag?

- Lima’s coastline is very beautiful.

We can also use it in complex noun phrases (underlined):

- Greg is her youngest daughter’s husband.

We also use possessive ’s to talk about time and duration:

- Is that yesterday’s paper?

- I’ve only had one week’s holiday so far this year.