A possessive or ktetic form (abbreviated POS or POSS; from Latin: possessivus; Ancient Greek: κτητικός, romanized: ktētikós) is a word or grammatical construction indicating a relationship of possession in a broad sense.
This can include strict ownership, or a number of other types of relation to a greater or lesser degree analogous to it.
[1] 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.
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".
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").
For example, French has mon, ma, mes, respectively 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.
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 the previous.
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).
There is however a distinct form whose[3] for the possessive of the interrogative and relative pronoun who; other languages may have similarly functioning words, such as the Russian чей chey ("whose?").
In English, this 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'.
An example from Japanese is: nekocatnoPTCLirocolorneko no irocat 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").
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").
Other languages may use differing forms; for example French may use ...est à moi for "...is mine".
In some other languages, however, the equivalent words behave more like true adjectives (compare the Italian example above, for instance).
(Some languages occasionally use the dative case to denote the possessor, as in the Serbo-Croatian kosa mu je gusta "his hair is thick" (literally "the hair to him is thick" in which "to him" is the dative pronoun mu).
[16] In many Afro-Asiatic languages, such as Arabic, nouns take a form with similar significance called the construct state, sometimes even if the possessor is marked in the genitive case.
[17] One result of this shift in terminology is the mistaken belief that the possessive form is only used for actual cases of possession or ownership (e.g., my book, the family's home) and not to indicate other, non-ownership forms of affiliation or association (e.g., their neighbor, the tree's environs).