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Familiarity with English Property Attributes

English possessive adjectives such as My , Your and His ,English possessive adjectives such as My , Your and His , along with nouns, are used to indicate the ownership and sense of belonging of a human, animal, or object.

The possessive adjectives in English are not very different in appearance from the possessive pronouns, but the possessive adjectives in English are not used alone. In fact, the possessive adjective always appears with the noun in the sentence and has no meaning without it.

In order to understand and get acquainted with these attributes, this note examines how they are used and common mistakes when using them.

How to use English property attributes

Property attributes, as mentioned, are used in English to indicate the ownership of a name. English property attributes include:

Singular: My , Your , His , Her and Its

Collectors: Out , Your and Their

For a better understanding, consider the following three examples of English adjectives :

She likes your hat.

In this example, the adjective ” Your ” is used before the name ” Hat ” to tell us who owns the hat.

I think her dog has eaten my gerbil.

In this sentence, the English possessive adjectives ” Her ” and ” My ” are used before the nouns ” Dog ” and ” Gerbil ” to tell the listener or reader who the dog and rat belong to.

It’s a luxury for those who want some freedom from their smartphones. That much we’ve learned in the past two years.

In this example, ” Their ” is used before the name ” Smartphones ” to indicate to the reader or listener who owns the smartphones.

At the beginning of the note, it was mentioned that possessive pronouns are similar in appearance to English possessive adjectives . To avoid misuse of them, you can consider each subject and possessive pronoun with a corresponding adjective as a group. This will help you to distinguish between the two. Note the following table:

Common Mistakes When Using Property Attributes

Although it is very rare for English possessive adjectives to be misused grammatically , spelling mistakes are still very common. Given the use of possessive adjectives in English, spelling mistakes can undoubtedly call into question your credibility, especially if you are used to them. Here are four common mistakes made by language learners along with simple solutions to solve them.

Writing ” It’s ” instead of ” Its ” is an English adjective

It has been seen many times that language learners have used the abbreviated form ” It’s ” instead of the possessive adjective ” Its “. ” It’s ” is not an adjective, but an abbreviated form of ” It is ” or ” It has “. Consider the following example:

A country can be judged by the quality of it’s proverbs.

This is somewhat understandable given the fact that in English the combination of apostrophe and the letter S ( ‘s ) is used to indicate ownership in addition to property attributes . Do not forget, however, that in English no symbol, such as an apostrophe, is used to indicate ownership by means of property attributes .

Write ” You’re ” instead of ” Your “

” You’re “, which is an abbreviated form of ” You are “, has often been used instead of ” Your “, an English property . You can use a trick to prevent this mistake. In this way, if you can not expand the shortened form and use it as its original form, know that you have made a mistake. Consider the following example:

Even if you fall on you’re face, you’re still moving forward.

Here You’re face is wrong because we can not write or say You are face . But pay attention to the second You’re . Here we can expand it and write:

You are still moving forward.

You can use this trick to fix other common similar mistakes.

Misuse of ” There “, ” Their ” and ” They’re “

Beginner learners sometimes misuse these three words instead. You should note that ” They’re ” is an abbreviated form of ” They are “. ” Theirs ” is one of the attributes of English property . ” There ” is used as a placeholder like ” Here “. In addition, ” There ” is used to refer to “being”.

Forgive your enemies, but never forget there names.

In this example, the property adjective ” Their ” should be used to refer to their names .

Misuse of ” His ” and ” Her “

One issue to consider about English possessive attributes is the gender of the third person singular possessive. In fact, we can not use ” Its “, which is a property adjective without gender for humans. That’s why we use ” His ” for men and ” Her ” for women . Note the following examples:

Each owner is responsible for its dog.

We cannot use ” Its ” here to refer to the dog owner .

Each owner is responsible for his dog.

Also, the possessive adjective ” His ” cannot be used in this sentence because we do not know if all dog owners are male or female.

Therefore, before using the third person singular adjective, consider the gender of the noun so that you do not make such a mistake.