this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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“My” is a pronoun.
I think it's an adjective.
By most modern accounts, it's a determiner.
One of them floaty guys that try to kill Harry?
No, a determiner is a person who mines deuterium.
I thought determiners were the guys that hacked games for secrets and stuff?
No, that's a dataminer.
A determiner is a mafia-type, usually found in smoke-filled back rooms with wads of cash and a pistol on the table.
"My" is the first-person singular possessive pronoun in English. It fills the same role in a sentence as the pronouns "his" or "her" or "their".
"This is my/his/her/their thing."
I don't see how it could be anything but a pronoun.
A pronoun replaces the noun. An adjective usually accompanies the noun, but it never replaces it.
"My house is there". I've never heard anyone saying "My is there". But I did hear saying "Mine is there".
That's actually a matter of some contraversiality.
You can't actually just replace "my" in a sentence with an adjective and have it come out sounding natural. You can say "this is my house" but you can't say "this is big house". You're missing a determiner, not an adjective.
This is further complicated by the fact that some words are sometimes true pronouns, and sometimes possessive determiners (his, her, its). In this way, it is difficult to fully separate the role of possessive determiner from the role of pronoun.
But thank you for making me research it a bit more.
Depends on the language, some languages use the pronoun as the possessive as well.