LRD - Gramática: Adjetivos Posesivos (Lesson)

Gramática: Adjetivos Posesivos

Possessive adjectives, as in English, are used to express ownership of something, such as "my book" or "his friends." There is a presentation below which describes how sentences are structured using these kinds of verbs. Take notes as you view the material as you will be responsible for the content. Be sure your speakers are turned up!

Please watch the following video.

 

Possession Using De

In English when we want to indicate that something belongs to someone we add an apostrophe and an "s" to their name. For example:

Susana's book
Francisco's bicycle
Esteban and David's dogs

We cannot do the same in Spanish. There is no apostrophe in Spanish and adding an "s" just makes things look plural. Instead, we need to use the following formula including the word de (meaning "of"):

 

NOTE: You can also use general nouns instead of names: el equipo de la escuela.

Here are the examples from above in their Spanish translation:

el libro de Susana
la bicicleta de Francisco
los perros de Esteban y David

Simple enough, right? But we don't always use people's names to indicate possession.

 

Possession with Possessive Adjectives

You don't normally think of them this way, but words like "my," "your," "our," and "their" are actually adjectives. They do, after all, modify nouns like any other adjective.

In fact, they are known as "possessive adjectives." Here are all of the English possessive adjectives: my, your, his, her, its, our, your, and their.

In Spanish, as in English, there are two types of possessive adjectives: short-form and long-form. We'll look at the short form for this particular module:

 

Short Form Possessive Adjectives in Spanish

The basic short-form possessive adjectives look like this: mi, tu, su, nuestro, vuestro, and su.

You may be wondering why tu doesn't have the accent you're accustomed to seeing. Remember the word tú is a subject pronoun and means "you." The word tu (without the accent) is an adjective and means "yours." Understanding this distinction is very important.

We use short-form possessive adjectives in Spanish the same way we do in English. We place the adjective in front of the noun. The formula looks like this:

 

Here are some examples:

English: my car, your car, our car

Spanish: mi coche, tu coche, nuestro coche

If the examples above look pretty easy, they're only the basic forms. Like any good Spanish adjective, possessive adjectives need to agree in number so we have some variations for plural forms:

mi, mis	nuestro, nuestros
tu, tus	vuestro, vuestros
su, sus	su, sus

 

Now would be a good time to talk about what we mean by "plural" in this situation. The plural form is used when we have more than one thing being possessed, not when we have more than one possessor:

English: my cars, your cars, our car

Spanish: mis coches, tus coches, nuestro coche

In the first example, since there is more than one car, "my" is translated in the plural mis even though there is only one of me. Similarly in the second example, "your" is translated in the plural tus even though there is only one of you. In the last example, there is more than one of us, but we use the singular nuestro because this time there is only one car. If you can remember that adjectives (even possessive adjectives) only agree with the nouns they modify, this concept shouldn't be too difficult.

But now it's going to start to get complicated because Spanish adjectives also need to agree in gender. Look at our (simplified) possessive adjectives again:

mi, mis	nuestro, nuestros
tu, tus	vuestro, vuestros
su, sus	su, sus

 

We can't really change the "i" in mi from one gender to another since "i" is gender-neutral. The same thing can be said for the "u" in both tu and su. We can, however, change nuestro and vuestro from their current masculine states to feminine ones which means we have even more variations:

mi, mis	nuestro, nuestra, nuestros, nuestras
tu, tus	vuestro, vuestra, vuestros, vuestras
su, sus	su, sus

 

Just like how we decide whether to use a singular or a plural adjective, we pick a masculine or a feminine adjective based on the gender of the thing(s) being possessed, not the gender of the possessor:

 

In the first example, nuestra agrees (in gender and in number) with the noun it modifies, bicicleta, and has nothing to do with the fact that it belongs to a group of girls. You'll notice that changing the ownership to a group of boys does nothing to the phrase because the noun being modified is still bicicleta (singular and feminine). Likewise in the last example, nuestros agrees in gender and in number with libros and has nothing to do with the girls (gender or number) who own the books.

 

Ambiguity With Su and Sus

How would you translate these phrases?

su camisa
su coche
sus llaves

Looking at our charts we see that su and sus could mean "his," "her," "its," "your" (in the Ud. or Uds. form), or even "their." While there wouldn't be much confusion with any of the other possessive adjectives, su and sus cause some trouble since they can mean so many different things. What do Spanish-speaking people do in order to be understood?

First of all, context will take care of most of these kinds of problems. If these phrases popped up in a conversation about Gloria, for example, it would be fairly clear that they mean "her shirt," "her car," and "her keys." But if you heard them in a conversation about different things belonging to different people, it wouldn't be so clear. If the context doesn't help, we can use a more accurate construction including the preposition de.

 

Some Examples:

 

(You may be wondering why "de él" doesn't get shortened to "del." It's important that we don't shorten it in this situation because "de él" doesn't mean "of the" but rather "of he" meaning "his.")

It looks strange to English speakers but possessive adjectives are frequently omitted when talking about body parts and clothing (and other items closely associated with a person). This is especially true of sentences including an object pronoun:

 

Possessive Adjectives Review Activities

Below are several review activities to help you practice possessive adjectives.

Please complete the following activity. 

 

Test your knowledge with this activity.

Please complete the activity below. *HINT- Look at the other verb (s) in the sentence... who is the subject? That will tell you who the possessor is.

 

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