Harvey's Elementary Grammar and Composition · Lesson 65–67 · Part 2: Part II: The parts of speech in full

58. Parsing possessive pronouns

Goal: Your child can parse possessive pronouns and tell them from possessive forms like my and his before a noun.

⏱ About 25 minutes · 6 steps

Open it at the Internet Archive ↗

You'll need

  • The book, open to this lesson
  • Paper and a pencil (or a slate)

What's in the book

Lesson 65 lists the possessive pronouns and their emphatic forms, Lessons 66 and 67 give the order of parsing and two ways to parse "That house is mine, not yours," with eleven sentences.

The lesson, step by step

  1. Review

    Ask: What is a possessive pronoun? (Lesson 31.)

  2. The list

    Read:

    The Possessive Pronouns are mine, thine, his, hers, ours, yours, theirs.

    The book adds the emphatic forms my own, his own, thy own and so on.

  3. The model

    Read the book's model for "That house is mine, not yours":

    Mine is a pronoun; possessive; it represents both the possessor and the thing possessed.

    The book also shows the other way: take mine as "my house" and parse my and house separately.

  4. Parse

    Find and parse the possessive pronouns:

    That horse of yours is lame.

    This sled is not yours: it must be hers.

    These books are yours, not theirs.

  5. A tricky one

    Look at:

    The boy left his hat, and took mine.

    Ask: Which is a possessive pronoun? (mine) Why not his? (It has a noun after it.)

  6. Use it today

    Use "of mine" or "of ours" in a sentence today, as in "a friend of mine."

Answers to the book's problems

1 yours. 2 yours, hers. 3 your own. 4 mine. 5 theirs. 6 mine, his, hers. 7 ours. 8 yours, theirs. 9 ours. 10 mine (his is a personal pronoun in the possessive case). 11 your own, hers.

Worked out for this site from the scan. If a number in your copy differs, trust the book.

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