| Possessive | It. example | It. tag |
| (i) miei (amici) | DP/mp | |
| mio (cugino) | DP/ms | |
| (la) nostra (casa) | DP/fs | |
| (i) nostri (cugini) | DP/mp | |
In English, Possessives are classified as Determiners on the basis of their complementary distribution with respect to the article (``my book'', ``the book''). This kind of distribution in Italian works only with a closed number of family nouns, used in the singular: ``mio/il padre'', ``mia/la madre'', ``mio/il fratello'', ``mia/la sorella'' (see the table above). Other nouns do not show this correspondence, e.g. ``il libro'' / *``mio libro''. At the level of encoding, this different behaviour is not represented.
Possessives are inflected for Number and Gender and agree with the noun; they are distinguished according to the Person referred to (see the table for Pronouns above):
``Scrivo con la tua DP/fs penna, perché non ho la mia''
The two Italian possessives: `altrui' (`of other people') and ``proprio' (`own') can be used with determiner function:
``spende il denaro altrui DP/nn, non il proprio''
``occorre dare del proprio DP/ms denaro, non dell'altrui''
As already mentioned for Possessive Pronouns, information about the possessor is not encoded in the Italian lexicon or corpus, but it can be inferred from the lemma.