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I would like to simultaneously introduce my thesis partner Lisa and refer to our thesis. I.e. summarise the following in one sentence:

I conducted a thesis project with Lisa. As outlined in our thesis, ...

What is correct:

As outlined in mine and her thesis...

As outlined in mine and Lisa's thesis...

or

As outlined in my and her thesis...

As outlined in my and Lisa's thesis...

This question is similar but has a different order and the suggestion is to instead use "our" which is not applicable in my case.

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    Why is 'our' not applicable here - it is the first thing that came to my mind.
    – MikeB
    Jan 8, 2020 at 13:29
  • Can you please clarify whether you and Lisa each wrote a thesis, or whether you wrote one thesis jointly?
    – JavaLatte
    Jan 8, 2020 at 13:32
  • @MikeBrockington this is the first (and last) time I introduce Lisa in the text.
    – FerventHippo
    Jan 8, 2020 at 13:52
  • @JavaLatte I added a bit more information for the use case, hopefully this clarifies what I intend.
    – FerventHippo
    Jan 8, 2020 at 13:55
  • 1
    If you collaborated on the thesis, 'our' is applicable.
    – Kate Bunting
    Jan 8, 2020 at 16:30

2 Answers 2

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According to the Cambridge Dictionary, mine is a pronoun, and refers back to something already mentioned... and my is a determiner, which must be followed by the thing that's yours.

1) How's your thesis going? I've nearly finished mine.

2) I have nearly finished my thesis.

So, if you say

As outlined in mine and Lisa's thesis

mine refers back to something already mentioned: not a thesis, otherwise you could say "mine and Lisa's." - maybe a dissertation. So you are referring to your dissertation and Lisa's thesis.

As outlined in my and her thesis

her refers to somebody that you have already mentioned or the listener already knows about. Writing my and her sounds like you are talking about two separate theses. If it's just one thesis that you jointly wrote,it would be better to say our.

Note that it is conventional to put your own pronoun last- in this case her and my.

As outlined in my and Lisa's thesis

This would work if Lisa had not already been mentioned. You can't say our because the listener doesn't know who you are talking about yet. You should put yourself last Lisa's and my.

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I would choose to write this as:

As outlined in our thesis, Lisa and I [found|said|revealed] ...

Other than the first two, the examples in JavaLatte's answer do not sound grammatically correct/normal to my ears.

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  • So the answer to the question is that both are ungrammatical? Or simply not idiomatic?
    – FerventHippo
    Jan 9, 2020 at 13:16
  • I wasn't brought up to follow grammatical rules, so can't comment on that, but certainly they are not idiomatic.
    – MikeB
    Jan 10, 2020 at 11:18

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