Where is the possessive noun and possessive pronoun in this sentence. Can you find them? I can’t find my mom’s keys.
Let’s take a quick look at some types of words –
Nouns – people, places, things, or ideas (doctor, classroom, car, liberty)
Adjectives – adjectives modify nouns and pronouns. (serious doctor, quiet classroom, fast car)
Nouns have what are called cases. The case of a noun tells us more about what the noun is doing in the sentence. In English, the main noun cases are nominative, objective, and possessive.
Nouns in the possessive case show ownership. They don’t perform any of the noun jobs. So, what do they do? Let’s have a look – mom’s keys, student’s books, school’s classrooms – The keys belong to the mom. The books belong to the student. The classrooms belong to the school. These all show possession. Let’s look at an example – I can’t find Mom’s keys. Mom’s is a possessive noun. It’s telling us whose keys we are talking about.
What job is Mom’s performing in the sentence? It’s functioning as an adjective modifying the noun keys. It’s functioning as an adjective!
We even diagram these nouns as adjectives. They go under the noun that they are modifying.
Now we know what job possessive nouns perform. Do you remember what they do? They perform the job of an adjective.
However, there’s something we need to think about – adjectives modify nouns. They don’t modify adjectives. That means that we would not have an adjective modifying another adjective. So, can possessive nouns be modified by adjectives? Let’s find out. Look at this sentence and focus on the word my – I can’t find my mom’s keys! – What is my modifying? Where should we put it in the sentence diagram?
My is a possessive pronoun, which functions as an adjective, but it doesn’t seem to be modifying the noun keys. They are not my keys. They are are my mom’s keys. My seems to be modifying mom’s, and mom’s is functioning as an adjective. But didn’t we say adjectives don’t modify other adjectives? What’s going on here?
Possessive nouns can be modified by adjectives. Even though they function as adjectives, they maintain some of their “noun-ness” and can still be modified by adjectives, just like nouns in the nominative and objective cases.
Normally, we would only diagram an adverb underneath an adjective since adjectives are modified by adverbs. Because of that, you might need to look twice at this to remember that my is actually an adjective modifying a possessive noun… which is functioning as an adjective. 🙂
Source: https://www.english-grammar-revolution.com/possessive-nouns.html
