Adjectivestheir

Adjectivestheir is a coinage used in some linguistic discussions to denote a proposed category of adjectives that participate in marking possession within noun phrases. It is not a widely established term in standard grammars and does not have a single, canonical definition.

Possible interpretations of the term include two main uses. In typology, adjectives labeled as adjectivestheir are thought to carry possessive morphology or to alter agreement patterns in ways that express ownership, effectively functioning alongside possessive determiners or pronouns. In corpus linguistics or annotation schemes, adjectivestheir may be a data label used to flag adjectives whose meanings are strongly influenced by the possessor context, such as in constructions like “their big house” where the possessor frame provided by “their” shapes the interpretation of the following adjective.

In practical analysis, such patterns are rare and the term’s usage varies. Some scholars caution that the label risks conflating determiner and adjective functions, while others see it as a useful heuristic for discourse analysis or for coding experimental data that explore possessor semantics in adjective phrases.

See also: possessive adjective, possessive pronoun, determiner, attributive adjective, noun phrase structure, typology.

Notes: Because adjectivestheir is not standardized, readers should treat it as a provisional label encountered in limited discussions and consult primary sources when they encounter the term in research.