Determinative and Independent Possessive Pronouns

Some call possessive adjectives, perhaps confusingly, determinative possessive pronouns. “Determinative”, because they constitute determiner phrases. It should be noted however that precisely because a possessive adjective constitutes a determiner phrase, and not a noun phrase, strictly speaking its lexical category is determiner, not pronoun.

In such contexts, in order to distinguish determinative possessive pronouns from the possessive pronouns described above, the latter are also called independent possessive pronouns, because they constitute full noun phrases and do not depend on a noun. For example, while “my” must be followed by a noun such as “glasses” in “my glasses”, “mine” already subsumes such a noun.

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