Possessional

Possessional is an adjective describing anything related to possession—the state of owning something or the possessor of an object. In linguistic description, possessional forms are those that encode the relation of ownership between possessor and possessed.

These forms may be affixes attached to a possessed noun, independent possessive pronouns, or possessive modifiers within a clause. They serve to indicate who owns something and can carry information about the possessor’s person, number, or relational context. The label “possessional” is commonly used in descriptive or typological grammars to distinguish possession-marking from other kinds of marking in a language.

In practice, possession can be expressed in a variety of ways. English often uses possessive determiners or the 's construction to show ownership, but many languages employ dedicated possessional morphemes—such as suffixes or prefixes on the possessed noun—to mark ownership directly. Some languages also encode possession through agreement on verbs or through separate possessive noun phrases, depending on the linguistic system.

The term is not as widely used in everyday grammar as possessive or genitive, but it appears in theoretical and cross-linguistic work to emphasize the semantic and syntactic dimensions of possession. It provides a label for describing how a language marks the relationship between possessor and possessed beyond the more general terms of ownership.

See also: possessive, possession, genitive, possessor.