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Why do I need to place the preposition "of" before the possessive pronoun "mine" in this sentence?
A friend of mine.
What would happen if I didn't place it like in the sentence "a friend mine". Is this an attributive case? Are there any other cases like this but using other prepositions?
Possessives that go after the noun they modify with an "of": (mine, yours, ours, theirs, his, hers, ...) can also be used with linking verbs:
It was mine. ==> It was a book of mine.
It will be yours. ==> It will be a book of yours.
Possessives that go just before the noun they modify (my, your, our, their, his, her, ...) aren't used in the "of" form, except for special cases where adding an extra 's' at the end of the possessive doesn't make sense because it already has an 's' (for example, his), so the same word is used for both roles: (his book ==> a book of his).
Another collection of possessives (mine, yours, ours, theirs, his, hers, ...), which go after the noun they are associated with and using an "of", cannot be used just before the noun unless they are a special dual-role possessive (his). These can also be used with linking verbs, as in "It was mine." ... or ... "It will be yours."
In English we can only have one central Determiner in a noun phrase. Determiners are usually words like a, the, no, some, any, which, my, your, his, her and so forth.
Because we can only have one of these words in a noun phrase we cannot say things like:
The noun phrases above are all ungrammatical in English, although you can say things like that in many other languages, for example, in Italian. Notice that they all have two Determiners. Also notice that one of the Determiners is a possessive pronoun or possessive noun phrase (my, your, Bob's).
To solve this problem, we often make a longer noun phrase and put the owner or possessor in a preposition phrase after the noun. We usually use the preposition of. So we can make grammatical noun phrases which have the same meanings as the examples above like this:
Here the preposition of is necessary to glue the second noun phrase to the first one. It is not optional. The following noun phrases are all ungrammatical:
The construction "a friend of mine" is known as double genitive and is used to mean that you have other friends, as opposed to "my friend" (you have only one friend, or that person is the one you consider as your friend at the time).
"*a friend mine" is ungrammatical.
Note: The term "double genitive" is used by Quirk in his "Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language." Below is the pertinent extract:
