Possessive Determiners and Possesive Pronouns

Possessives, as their name suggests, indicate possession or that something belongs to someone. If the possessive accompanies a noun, then it is a possessive determiner. If the noun is omitted, it is a possessive pronoun.

Possessive Determiners (Unstressed) - Usage and Form

There are two types of possessive determiners in Spanish: tonic (or stressed) and atonic (or unstressed). Tonic or stressed possessive determiners always follow the noun that designates the thing possessed. In this grammar point, we will just cover unstressed possesive determiners to avoid confusion, and talk about tonic possessive determiners when we get to a higher language level.

Rule 1. We use unstressed possessive determiners to indicate that an object belongs to someone.

Rule 2. Possessive determiners correspond to the grammatical persons.

*Note that the possessive determiner of tu doesn't have an accent mark to differentiate it from the subject pronoun.

Rule 3. All possessive determiners must agree in number. In the case of nosotros(as) and vosotros(as), they must also agree in gender.

Possessive Pronouns - Usage and Form

Rule 4. Possessive pronouns do not complement the noun. Instead, they substitute it to avoid repetition. They require a definite article and have to agree in both gender and number with the noun they are substituting.

Rule 5. Each person has a pronoun. In this case, since their function is to substitute a noun, they all have a gender and number, in contrast with the possessive determiners.