Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online

This feature concerns the expression of adnominal possession when the possessor is a (non-focused, non-contrastive) personal pronoun (e.g. ‘my book’, ‘her mother’, ‘your hair’).

Possessive relations are defined as comprising ownership, body-part relations and kinship relations (and of course normally other abstract relations as well, but these three are criterial.)

Personal pronouns expressing possessors may be separate words (preceding or following the possessum), or affixes (prefixes or suffixes) on the possessum). Another possibility is that pronominal possessors are linked to the possessum by an adposition, with the adpositional phrase preceding or following the possessum.