Possessive adjectives in Russian and English

In Russian, there are several categories of adjectives: they are of high quality, relative and possessive. The former express the qualities of the subject: high, thin, wide, large, slow, red, etc. Qualitative names include adjectives that denote color, shape, character traits, physical and spatio-temporal attributes of the word being defined. As a rule, high-quality adjectives have several grammatical features, due to which they can be distinguished from the adjectives of the remaining categories.

Relative adjectives most often denote the material, the composition of the subject designated by the defined word, its time sign or purpose: plastic, fur, parent, tomorrow. All these signs are constant, and adjectives do not form degrees of comparison and do not have other signs of qualitative adjectives. Therefore, in most cases, they are quite easy to distinguish. But not always.

Finally, another category is possessive adjectives expressing the belonging of the defined word: fox fur, mother's scarf, shark tail. However, sometimes confusion may arise, since it is not always easy to distinguish possessive adjectives. Examples are illustrative: fox fur and fox fur coat (that is, made from fox fur), shark fin and shark steak (from shark), a rather significant difference, is not it? Even possessive adjectives can be confused with qualitative adjectives, but this is rare and usually happens if the adjective is used in the figurative meaning - "bear walk."

In addition, possessive adjectives (unlike other adjectives) have zero endings. In the phrase "bear fur" the adjective is formed from the noun "bear" by adding the suffix "i" and has a zero ending, and the adjectives "red", "distant" have the ending "i". So knowledge of adjective ranks can also help in parsing words by composition.

Russian textbooks on English also have some confusion about what to consider possessive adjectives (posessive adjectives), because they are traditionally studied in the subject of possessive pronouns, thus distinguishing between the relative and absolute form of pronouns. However, there is no such classification in British English, only possessive pronouns and possessive adjectives are listed in the table below.

Possessive English adjectives are thus often referred to as the relative form of possessive pronouns, however, in fact, this category does not exist. This is done for the convenience of studying English grammar, since in Russian these words are really pronouns.

In this case, adjectives are easy to distinguish, because they always require a noun after themselves (i.e. my pen, his coat), while pronouns are used in grammatical constructions like this pencil is mine, that coat is his (i.e. behind them should not be a noun). Possessive adjectives in both languages ​​is a topic that has a lot of nuances that need to be taken into account, so it is better to study it thoroughly.