In the following sentence, should the possessive adjective 'our' be used? And I'd like to know other possible adjectives.
××× When the mosquito bites a human, she injects saliva into our skin before drawing blood.
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1Maybe, their, his ...– danNov 21, 2017 at 5:41
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It should be his or his or her; their would be using the "singular they", which is considered ungrammatical in proper English. It's one of those errors that native speakers make all of the time. Also, "our" is not technically a possessive pronoun; "ours" is the possessive pronoun; "our" is the possessive adjective, but people call it a pronoun all of the time as well.– NickNov 21, 2017 at 6:03
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@NicholasCastagnola "Our" and "ours" are both pronouns. The former is a independent genitive pronoun and the latter a dependent genitive pronoun. It doesn't matter whatever you call them after all.– user178049Nov 21, 2017 at 7:00
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I thought so too, but I've been corrected on here before about this and I've looked it up and technically "our" and "my" are possessive adjectives whereas "ours" and "mine" are possessive pronouns. This is technically speaking. They could also be called "genitives" as well.– NickNov 21, 2017 at 7:03
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Also you have it backwards: the independent one is "ours" and the dependent is "our"; you wrote above that the former (our) is the independent one, which is incorrect.– NickNov 21, 2017 at 7:06
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2 Answers
The correct pronoun in this case shouldn't be any. An article should be used instead.
The context seems to be one of observation or scientific study. Detachment is appropriate. You aren't really talking about a person in a personal sense, but a entity of type "human."
When the mosquito bites a human, she injects saliva into the skin before drawing blood.
The correct pronoun in this case should be ‘his’ or ‘her’.
‘our’ is incorrect in this case since ‘a human’ is singular while ‘our’ refers to a plural group of humans that includes the writer.
