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I'm reading the textbook "Complete English Grammar rules" by Peter Herring

There are two forms of personal pronouns in the possessive case: possessive determiners, and possessive pronouns. Possessive pronouns are personal pronouns in the possessive case which have the grammatical function of nouns.

Possessive adjectives, also known as possessive determiners, are used to indicate whom an item belongs to. “My dad’s glasses went missing.” (My is correctly used as a possessive determiner, modifying dad to show his relation to the speaker.)

I'm confused here, is possessive determiner an adjective or pronoun? I think my is an adjective in the example “My dad’s glasses went missing.” If it's an adjective, how could an adjective also be a pronoun simultaneously ?

Araucaria - Him
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Andrew Li
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    No, it's a pronoun, because it has reference; it's also a determiner. It's not an adjective because determiners like his and the have to come before all the adjectives in a noun phrase. You can't say tall my dad or big black plastic my Dad's glasses. Has someone told you that every word has only one part of speech? – John Lawler Sep 26 '22 at 16:21
  • I mean if 'my' is an adjective in 'my dad', it can't be a pronoun simultaneously. https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/my Here, 'my' is an adjective only. @JohnLawler – Andrew Li Sep 26 '22 at 16:39
  • (1) My is not an adjective in my dad. (2) Who said it can't be a pronoun simultaneously? Dictionaries are not, alas, authoritative about that; they mean it can modify, not that it's an adjective. Don't get your unbreakable rules from the internet. – John Lawler Sep 26 '22 at 16:43
  • Can you give me an example if one word can be both adjective and pronoun in a sentence? I mean that word just occurs once in a sentence, no repetition. Thank you so much. – Andrew Li Sep 26 '22 at 17:06
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    Possessive determiner - This is your* phone. Possessive pronoun - Mine is over there. Or if the positions were reversed, This is my phone - yours is over there*. – FumbleFingers Sep 26 '22 at 17:25
  • @AndrewLi A word cannot belong to two different word classes (parts of speech) simultaneously - that would be a theoretical impossibility. It's vital that you distinguish form and function: 'pronoun is a word class (part of speech) while 'determiner' is a function. In My dad’s glasses went missing "my" belongs to the word class noun (sub-class genitive pronoun) and its function is that of determiner (sub-class genitive). – BillJ Sep 26 '22 at 18:58
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    Incidentally the author of your book has an apt name, Peter Herring, since his 'rules' are very fishy! – BillJ Sep 26 '22 at 19:02
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    The different parts of speech have been changed. When I was growing up, my was considered an adjective. Today, it is considered a determiner. Determiners are words like the and my where (a) you generally only have one of them per noun (b) they modify nouns and come before the adjectives that modify the nouns. So for example, you can say my yellow submarine and the yellow submarine, but you can't say the my yellow submarine or yellow my submarine. So if you call my a "determiner", you probably shouldn't call it an "adjective". – Peter Shor Sep 26 '22 at 19:10
  • No: the terms adjective and determiner are not comparable. "My" is a genitive (possessive) pronoun -- that's its word class (part of speech). It is its function that is determiner. And they don't modify nouns -- they determine them, hence their functional name. – BillJ Sep 26 '22 at 19:21
  • So if that Peter's book is kinda fishy, Should I keep reading? What grammar book do you recommend? (I'm not a native speaker,And I really need a good grammar book to help me construct a systematic structure about English .) @BillJ – Andrew Li Sep 27 '22 at 01:37
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    @AndrewLi I strongly recommend this book link You can buy it on Amazon. – BillJ Sep 27 '22 at 07:32
  • @Bill: calling my a pronoun is misleading because it's not a noun. You can't use it as the subject of a sentence — my am going swimming later today is nonsensical. And calling determiners a part of speech is perfectly cromulent, and lots of people do it. See this webpage, for example. If Pullum says that determiners are not a part of speech, he has some strange ideas. – Peter Shor Sep 27 '22 at 12:40
  • @Bill: So here, Pullum seems to call the part of speech a determinative rather than a determiner. Tomayto, tomahto. – Peter Shor Sep 27 '22 at 12:48
  • Pronoun is a subclass of noun. There is no such thing as a 'pronoun phrase', so phrases headed by a pronoun, e.g. "mine" in "mine is the red one" are called NPs. Determiner is not a POS but a function, the corresponding POS being determinative. For example, in the NP "a young man", "a" belongs to the POS determinative and its function is that of determiner. Understanding this distinction is crucial to understanding the internal structure of NPs. – BillJ Sep 27 '22 at 14:20
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    @BillJ: If the Cambridge Dictionary classifies determiner as a part of speech, and doesn't even have a definition for the word determinative, then insisting that Pullum is right and everybody else is wrong is a little bit quixotic. – Peter Shor Sep 27 '22 at 15:08
  • Determiner vs. determinative. – Peter Shor Sep 28 '22 at 00:33

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It's not possible to answer this question without differentiating some very important ideas. There's a difference between a part of speech or a type of phrase and the job it does in its larger phrase or clause.

Preliminaries

Parts of speech have names like noun, adjective, verb. These refer to types of word. These types of word have certain groups of properties within a given language. So, for example, English nouns usually have singular and plural forms. They are usually pre-modified by either adjectives or nouns and they are never pre-modified by adverbs. There are a whole load of other properties that nouns can have. If you'd like to find out what (some of these) these are, see here. English adjectives on the other hand do not have singular and plural forms. They do often have comparative forms, like bigger and biggest and so forth.

Types of phrase have names like noun phrase, verb phrase, adjective phrase and so forth. These describe chunks of words built around, for example, a noun, verb or adjective.

The jobs that such words, or chunks of words, happen to be doing in a larger phrase or clause are often called syntactic functions or grammatical relations. These have names like Subject, Object, Locative Complement and Determiner. I will adopt the practice of using initial Capital Letters when talking about grammatical relations, as I have done in this paragraph.

Determiners within noun phrases.

Noun phrases come in two sections, in the same way that clauses do. While clauses have a Subject and a Predicate, noun phrases have a Determiner and a Head (some grammars may use different words for these). Note that these words refer to the jobs that different types of phrase may carry out within a given phrase or clause, not to the type of word or phrase that is carrying out that job.

Here are some examples of noun phrases with the Determiner placed in brackets. Note that adjective appears in the Head, and not in the Determiner:

  1. [The] big elephant.
  2. [That] big elephant.
  3. [My wife's] big elephant.
  4. [My wife's sister's] big elephant.
  5. [The woman you met yesterday's] big elephant.
  6. [Her] big elephant.
Araucaria - Him
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The question is: are possessives like my, your, his, etc. adjectives, determiners, or pronouns?

On the one hand, they clearly behave like other determiners:

  1. * I was reading book.
  2. I was reading a book.
  3. I was reading that book.
  4. I was reading my book.

(1) is wrong because "book" needs a determiner. (2)-(4) are fine because they contain a determiner. So one would think "my" is a determiner. Some grammars classify determiners as a kind of adjective, in which case you could also call it an adjective. On the other hand, my is pretty clearly just an inflectional form of I/me, with the exact same meaning. So it would seem we should also classify it as a pronoun. What gives?

One possible solution is to say that my in (4) is a pronoun that acts as a determiner. This would explain why it can alternate with a and that in (2)-(3), without denying that it is a form of I/me. This is more or less the approach taken by Huddleston & Pullum (2002).

As always, it's a bit more complicated than that. H&P use the term "determiner" purely as the name of a syntactic function, not as a part of speech. They would say that (2) and (3) contain determinatives acting as determiners, whereas (4) contains a pronoun acting as a determiner. (They consider articles to be a subtype of determinative, as in (2).)

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