possessive pronoun

A pronoun that can take the place of a noun phrase to show ownership (as in "This phone is mine").

The weak possessives (also called possessive determiners) function as adjectives in front of nouns. The weak possessives are my, your, his, her, its, our, and their.

In contrast, the strong (or absolute) possessive pronouns stand on their own: mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours, and theirs.

A possessive pronoun never takes an apostrophe.

See also:

• Case
• Exercise: Recasting a Paragraph With Pronouns
• First-Person Pronouns
• Genitive
• Possessive Determiner
• Second-Person Pronouns
• Third-Person Pronouns
• Using the Different Forms of Pronouns

Examples and Observations:

• "Go on, get inside the TARDIS. Oh, never given you a key? Keep that. Go on, that’s yours. Quite a big moment really!"
  (The Doctor to Donna in "The Poison Sky." Doctor Who, 2005)



• "She underlines passages in my Bible because she can't find hers."
  (Ned in "The War of the Simpsons." The Simpsons, 1991)



• "Woman must have the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers--and before it can be his, it is hers alone."
  (Margaret Sanger)



• "Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained."
  (William Blake)



• "The possessive pronouns (mine, yours, his, etc.) are like possessive determiners, except that they constitute a whole noun phrase.
  
  
  1. The house will be hers you see when they are properly divorced.
  2. Writers have produced extraordinary work in conditions more oppressive than mine.
  Possessive pronouns are typically used when the head noun can be found in the preceding context; thus in 1, hers means 'her house,' and in 2, mine means ' my conditions.' Here the possessive pronoun is parallel to the elliptic use of the genitive."
  (D. Biber, S. Conrad, and G. Leech, Longman Student Grammar of Student and Written English. Pearson, 2002)



• "[The] construction with the possessive pronoun [e.g. a friend of mine] differs from the alternative of possessive determiner + noun (e.g. my friend) mainly in that it is more indefinite. The sentences in (30) below illustrates this point.

  (30) a. You know John? A friend of his told me that the food served at that restaurant is awful.
  
  (30) b. You know John? His friend told me that the food served at that restaurant is awful.

  The construction with the possessive pronoun, in (30a), can be used if the speaker hasn't specified and doesn't need to specify the identity of the friend. In contrast, the construction with the possessive determiner, in (30b), implies that the speaker and listener both know what friend is intended."
  (Ron Cowan, The Teacher's Grammar of English: A Course Book and Reference Guide. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008)