My things are mine, your things are yours

[Czwartek]

In English we have two forms for most possessive pronouns.
('His' is the only possessive pronoun which has only one form.)

My/mine
Your/yours
Her/hers
Our/ours
Their/theirs

My question is, how would you categorise this distinction, and are there other languages, natural or con, which have the same or a similar distinction?

[Ear of the Sphinx]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possessive_adjective - that's what I found on these.

[Micamo]

"my" is a possessive determiner which works as the specifier of a noun phrase. "mine" is a pronoun and works as the head of a noun phrase.

As for semantic differences, think of it somewhat in terms of the word "one." As in "I would like the red one." This construction is used when the noun being described by the adjective is non-salient or otherwise infer-able from context and thus can be omitted for economy reasons. The possessive pronoun "mine" works semantically exactly as if it were "*my one." This structure is ungrammatical in English (because "my" is not an adjective) but the usage is similar. e.g. "That kitty looks so sick! I'm glad [mine/my kitties] are healthy." They both mean exactly the same thing, "mine" is just shorter to say.

[Ear of the Sphinx]

You English have weird distinction between pronouns and analogical determiners. :-P

[eldin raigmore]

"my" is a possessive determiner which works as the specifier of a noun phrase. "mine" is a pronoun and works as the head of a noun phrase.

What she said.

[Ear of the Sphinx]

They're both pronouns-like, but the former is describing a noun, thus determiner and possessive adjective (and not adjective), thus not pronoun.

Polish grammarian would just say that "my" is an adjective pronoun (replacing an adjective) and "mine" is a substantive pronoun (replacing a noun). If they distinguished the two.

In Polish, pronouns make much wider word class than English one. There are:
- substantive pronouns, e.g. ja, ty, to, ktoś, cokolwiek | I, you, it, somebody, anything;
- adjective pronouns, e.g. mój, twój, ten, który | my, your, this, which;
- numeral pronouns, e.g. ile, trochę, wiele | how much, some, many
- adverbial pronouns, e.g. gdzieś, zawsze, nigdy | somewhere, always, never

Pronouns (exc. adverbial ones) are one of five inflecting classes:
nouns | adjectives | verbs | numerals | pronouns

Adverbial pronouns together with adverbs make one of five uninflected word classes:
adverbs | conjunctions | prepositions | particles | interjections

And there are other five parts of sentence:
subject | predicate | attribute | object | adverbial (the last three are modifiers)

[eldin raigmore]

In English we have two forms for most possessive pronouns.
('His' is the only possessive pronoun which has only one form.)

My/mine
Your/yours
Her/hers
Our/ours
Their/theirs

My question is, how would you categorise this distinction, and are there other languages, natural or con, which have the same or a similar distinction?

My, your, her, our, their are possessive adjectives.

Mine, yours, hers, ours, theirs are possessive pronouns.