Relative Clause and relative pronouns for creatures (URGENT!)?

Question

1.We know that "whose" is for possessive adjectives of persons.
2.What is the possessive adjective for things (non-living things and living things)?
3. Can anyone answer about the use of "whose" in the relative clause?

Please give examples for questions 1,2,3.

I want to know more about the use of whose and the relative pronouns of non-living things and living things. Thanks

Answer 1

Examples as requested:

1. Do you know whose book this is?
Whose car did you borrow?
Whose husband is that?

2. What the corresponding adjective for inanimate and lower animates would be is hard to answer; normally English does not attribute "possession" to inanimate objects, and so the corresponding question would be phrased a little differently: You could say, for example: "Of what is this a part" - but it sounds very stilted (although grammatically probably the best form) and in colloquial speech we would be more likely to say "What is this a part of", or even "what does this belong to", or even, in uneducated speech "What's this off?"; otherwise, we tend to focus either on what something is - in which case we sould ask "What is this?" - or on the person to whom a particular object belongs - in which case - "whose is this?"

Relating to animals, there could be instances when you might use "whose"; if, for example, you owned three dogs, each of which had a collar, and you found one collar on the floor, you might say "Whose collar is this?". If, on the other hand, you found a dog collar lying in the street and siad "Whose is this?" you would almost certainly be understood to be referring to the owner of the dog whose collar it was, rather than to the dog itself.

As a relative pronoun, "whose" is more freely used: The man whose wife I know....", "the child, whose name is Freddy, is very mischievous", but also, "the dog whose owner I saw yesterday", "the cat, whose owner is my neighbour, was sitting on the roof"; "the piranha, whose teeth are very sharp, is a South American fish", "the bees whose honey I eat live in my garden".

For inanimate objects, of which is the most correct form in literary English: "the table, of which the leg is broken", The table of which I broke the leg" etc, but even then we tend to express the idea in a different way: -"the table with the broken leg". In the speech of the uneducated, whose is sometimes used in this context also: "The table whose leg I broke", though more likely, "The table I broke the leg of", and even, horror of horrors, "the table I broke the leg off", or worse still "the table I broke the leg off of"!

All the foregoing relates to usage in the South of England; other people might give you different examples from other parts of the UK or from the USA, Canada or Australia/NZ