RESEARCH AND LANGUAGE TEACHING OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES. AN EXAMPLE: EXPRESSION IN POSSESSION OF THE ITALIAN AND FRENCH

Italian possessives belong to the category of optional determiners while French possessives are obligatory ones. This sole fact determines a whole range of differences in the way in which they are used: the presence or the absence of an article (mon livre, "il mio libro"), the changes of grammatical category (un de mes amis, "un mio amico"), the alternation between the personal pronoun and the possessive pronoun (il met son chapeau, "si mette it cappello"). In Italian, the absence of article before parental names is due to the fact that they are constructed as appellatives.