Objects & Modifiers

Possessives & Appositives

Two ways of adding information to a noun without a preposition or a clause: saying who owns it, and renaming it outright.

What you’ll learn

Diagram a possessive, including its apostrophe-s
Chain possessives when one owner owns another
Recognise an appositive and place it beside the noun it renames
Understand why the parser splits 'Omar's' into two tokens

Possessives

A possessive tells you who or what something belongs to, and it behaves exactly like an adjective: it narrows down the noun. So it hangs on a slant beneath that noun, with the ’s written as part of the word.

The parser sees it differently. Omar’s is two tokens — Omar and ’s — because the two halves do different jobs: Omar is the possessor and ’s is the grammatical marker making it possessive. They are drawn joined because that is how you read them.

“Omar's bicycle vanished.”

Reed-Kellogg — one slant, apostrophe-s attached

possPossession modifier
caseCase marking
nsubjNominal subject
ROOTRoot of the sentence

Dependency — poss and case, two separate nodes

Comparing the two views

Reed-Kellogg writes Omar’s as one label on one slant, because as a modifier it is one thing. The dependency parse insists on two nodes: Omar attaching to bicycle as poss, and ’s attaching to Omar as case. If you are ever puzzled that a four-word sentence has five tags in the exercise, this is why.

Appositives

An appositive renames the noun beside it. My neighbour Rosa grows chillies. — Rosa and my neighbour are the same person, mentioned twice in a row.

Because it is not a modifier and not an argument, it gets its own convention: written in parentheses immediately after the noun it renames, on the same line.

Look for two nouns side by side with no conjunction
my neighbour Rosa, my friend the doctor. If a comma separates them, it is still an appositive.
Check they refer to the same thing
If you can delete either one and the sentence still names the same person, they are in apposition.
Write it in parentheses after the head noun
The appositive shares the head noun’s slot rather than taking one of its own.

“My neighbour Rosa grows chillies.”

Reed-Kellogg — the appositive shares the noun's slot

possPossession modifier
nsubjNominal subject
apposAppositional modifier
ROOTRoot of the sentence
dobjDirect object

Dependency — appos subordinates one to the other

Comparing the two views

Reed-Kellogg puts the appositive inside the subject slot, in parentheses, so the picture says “these are one thing mentioned twice”. The tree cannot share a slot, so it subordinates: Rosa hangs off neighbour as appos. That makes the appositive look like a dependent of the noun, which understates the relationship — they are equals.

Key terms

Possessive: A noun or pronoun marking ownership. Relation poss; the apostrophe-s is a separate token with relation case. Omar’s coat is here. The teacher’s handwriting slants.
Possessive pronoun: my, your, her, its, our, their. Tagged PRP$, and drawn on a slant like any other possessive. Her coat is here. They lost their map.
See: Nouns & Pronouns
Appositive: A noun renaming the noun beside it. Written in parentheses in the diagram; relation appos. My friend Jacob called. The capital, Lima, is on the coast.
See: Nominal Dependents
Token split: The parser stores Omar’s and can’t as two units each, because their halves behave differently. They are drawn joined and clicked separately. Omar’s coat is here. — five tokens. We can’t stay. — four.
See: Grammar Basics

Practice on a real sentence

This sentence has a possessive in it. In the dependency exercise, look for the poss relation and notice which word it attaches to.

“John told the person being interviewed the reason for his unusual questions.”

Parts of speech

Give every word its coarse Universal Dependencies category.

Words 0/12Attempts 0Correct 0Time 0:00

Sentence — select a part of speech below, then click the word(s) it applies to

John told the person being interviewed the reason for his unusual questions.