PERSONAL PRONOUN/DETERMINER

Possessive
Lynne's	Lynne's
My	Mine
Your	Yours
His	His
Her	Hers
Its	Its
Our	Ours
Their	Theirs
Whose	Whose

For example:-

• This is Lynne's web site. It's my website! It's mine!
• It's not Zozanga's web site. It's not his website! It's not his!
• Have you seen her book? It's her book. It's hers.

Genitive Case

You should still use the "of" form of the possessive / genitive case when talking about things that belong to other things.

For example:-

• The door of the car. You can also say, "the car door".
• The top speed of the car is 1000 km/hr. You might also hear, "the car's top speed" in advertising, because they like to humanise things.
• The content of the website. You can also say, "the website content", or "the website's content".
• Go to the top of the page.

You may still hear someone say something like "The father of the bride," but it could equally be; "The bride's father."

POSSESSIVE CASE / GENITIVE CASE

There are different ways to show ownership of something. To show possession you can use nouns to modify other nouns.

(For purposes of clarity, we distinguish between the genitive case and the possessive case here.)

The good news is that the genitive case "of" is used less and less in English today. Hooray!

Possessive Case

The possessive case is used to show ownership. The possessive pattern or mark ('s) is generally used when indicating a relation of ownership or association with a person, rather than a thing. (Linguistically speaking it is a form of genitive case.)

Singular nouns take -'s.

For example:-

• Bob's presentation.
• Lynne's web site kept growing larger and larger.

There are, as ever, exceptions to this rule. When a group of people is involved or animals.

For example:-

• The members' forum. 
• The dogs' tails.

Companies are often treated like people.

For example:-

• Coca Cola's latest advertising campaign.

Irregular plural nouns that don't end in s take -'s.

For example:-

• The children's toys.
• The people's court.

Plural nouns that end in " s " take an apostrophe at the end ( ' ).

For example:-

• The girls' dresses.

People's names that end in "s" you can write (') at the end, or add ('s).

For example:-

• Charles' job was on the line.

or

• Charles's job was on the line.

Try to avoid sounding like hissing Sid though. When an added - s would lead to three closely bunched s or z sounds just use an apostrophe at the end.

• The map of Ulysses' journey.

If you have to show joint ownership, give the possessive form to the final name only.

• Abbott and Costello's famous baseball sketch.

Pronouns and determiners are inflected to show the possessive / genitive case.

Objective / Accusative Case

First you need to know what an object is. If the subject of a sentence is doing something to someone, that someone or something becomes the object of the sentence.

Now it might help you if you know what the term "case" means. It's the grammatical function of a noun or pronoun, thankfully almost extinct in the English language, but we haven't buried it yet.

A noun or pronoun is in the objective case when it is used as a direct object, an indirect object, or an object.

A noun which is directly affected by the action of a verb is put into the objective case. In English we call this noun the "direct object" which is a little more descriptive of its function. It's the direct object of some action.

• Robert fixed the car.

In the example above, the "car" is in the objective case because it's the direct object of Robert's action of fixing.

Pronouns are inflected to show the objective case

.

PERSONAL PRONOUN
Objective/Accusative
Referring to the object in a sentence
Me
You
Him
Her
It
Us
Them
Whom

For example:

• The web site gave Lynne a headache.
• Mum gave us the money.
• She gave him the book.

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