When do I use articles before possessive pronouns?
I am going through a grammar book and in a section about possessive pronouns it says i can use the articles (el, la, los, las) or skip them. The example sentences are: !Ven aqui hijo mío! Una prima mía esta casada con un australiano. ?Este libro es mío o tuyo? Esta taza es la mía, ?donde está la tuya?
So could I just as well write the following? !Ven aqui el hijo mío! Una prima la mía esta casada con un australiano. ?Este libro es el mío o el tuyo? Esta taza es mía, ?donde está tuya?
What is the rule to this? It seems easiest to just skip the articles all the time. Are they ever necessary?
thanks! BTW the formatting on this thing is horrible. How do I do line breaks?
3 Answers
I think, it is just like English here:
¿Este libro es mío o tuyo? Esta taza es la mía, ?donde está la tuya?
Is this book mine or yours?
This cup is the one of mine, where is (the one of) yours?
It seems here that the speakers mentioned the cup of mine and the one of yours just now, and the one of mine is just found, but yours not yet.
Esta taza es mía, ¿donde está tuya?
It seems that there are possibly many cups, and the speakers didn´t mention that before, that is, there is no context about the cup situation before the conversation. What we see now, this one is (one of) mine, but which one(s) or where is/are yours (maybe one or many)? We just want to clarify the ownership of them.
This is confusing because the long forms of the possessives are used in two ways:
as adjectives
as pronouns
In English both of these are translated as "mine"
When they are used as adjectives, they go after a noun and you need an article (either definite or indefinite). So,
mi prima "my cousin" becomes
la prima mía "my cousin" OR
una prima mía "a cousin of mine"
As a pronoun, you have to use definite article + long form to REPLACE a noun. For example, you could say
tu libro y el mío "your book and mine"
Here mine is a pronoun standing for "my book".
p.s. I think you can´t say "!Ven aqui el hijo mío!" because you are addressing your son. I think you could say "El hijo mío tiene 2 años", although it would sound a little pretentious.
When the possessive functions as an adjective, no article e.g. "hijo mío", "una prima mía" or as a predicate adjective as in your "libro es mío o tuyo". When it is a pronoun, you need the article: ¿donde está la tuya?
