Question 40 on the 2024 Year 6 Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling paper reads as follows:
Before you read on, what do you think is the answer?
You may not have been sure about his, but you’re nevertheless likely to have answered ‘determiner’, because you know that the is a determiner.
However, those who know the Department for Education glossary really well may have been puzzled and/or confused by this question. After all, possessive words like my, you, our, his, i.e. those occurring before nouns, as opposed to those occurring on their own (yours, ours) appear in two glossary entries, namely those for ‘determiner’ and ‘pronoun’:
Note that most grammars do not allow a word in a particular construction to belong to more than one word class at the same time. So we cannot say that his in his little brother is both a determiner and a pronoun. It can only belong to one word class.
The treatment of pre-nominal possessives in the glossary is a serious flaw which is likely to cause confusion. It should have been corrected a long time ago.
You may be wondering what is the correct answer? Is his in his little brother a determiner or a pronoun? Different grammarians will give you different answers, but I think the analysis in Huddleston and Pullum’s Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CUP, 2002) makes sense: because this word has a genitive ending, and only nouns can have such endings, these possessive words are best regarded as pronouns. (And remember that pronouns are a subclass of nouns.) This analysis has the advantage that his in his little brother and his in that bike is his are analysed in the same way, namely as possessive pronouns.
As for question 40 above, it should not have appeared in the test, and the normally meticulous test review groups at the DfE should have weeded it out.
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