Label the part of speech HELP

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somesayJessica

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Joined
Sep 27, 2010
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Student or Learner
Hello all,
I was asked to label the part of speech for each of the words in the following sentence:

They made their way slowly across the deserted square.

This is what I came up with. Please help me correct any errors.

They pronoun or collective noun? made verb their pronoun way noun?
slowly adverb across preposition the article deserted adjective
square
noun.

:-?

Thank you for any advice or corrections you may have to offer.
J.
 

philo2009

Senior Member
Joined
Jan 16, 2009
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Academic
Native Language
British English
Home Country
UK
Current Location
Japan
Mainly correct: 'they' is indeed a pronoun (not a noun of any kind!), and 'their', although technically a possessive-case form of the pronoun, nevertheless possesses certain syntactic features of the adjective*, and is therefore more commonly referred to by linguists nowadays as a possessive adjective, this label also serving usefully to distinguish the quasi-adjectival set 'my, your, their,...' from the exclusively pronominal set 'mine, yours, theirs,...'.

*Cf. German mein, meine, meinen, etc., with correspondingly declined forms having existed in earlier forms of English too.
 
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