We have seen in several places that possessive pronouns and prenominal possessive noun phrases may alternate with postnominal van-PPs; we illustrate this again in (469). This section concludes our discussion of possessive pronouns by pointing out some differences between the prenominal possessors and the postnominal PPs.

A first difference involves the use of the possessors in questions like (470). As was already pointed out in the discussion of example (412) in Section 5.2.2.1, the use of the interrogative possessives wiens/wier'whose' is rather formal. The colloquial manner of asking the intended question is by means of a possessive van-PP, as in (470a'). The questions in (470) evoke an elliptical answer, which only involves the possessor. The (b)-examples show, however, that using a possessive pronoun or genitive noun phrase gives rise to a degraded result; the more formal question in (470a) is also answered by means of the van-PP in (470b').

Similar contrasts can also be found in other elliptical contexts like given in (471).

      The second difference involves the form of the pronoun: example (472) shows that whereas the possessive pronoun can be either weak or strong, use of a weak pronoun as the complement of the preposition van gives rise to a marginal result. It should be noted, however, that using a weak pronoun is possible if we replace the definite article by the distal demonstrative dat: dat boek van me'that book of mine', provided that the noun phrase is interpreted as referring to an entity that is familiar to the hearer; Section 5.2.3.2, sub IIB, discusses this special construction in more detail.

      A third difference concerns the use of the possessor in predicative postcopular position: the examples in (473) show that this is excluded with possessive pronouns and genitive noun phrases but possible with van-PPs.

      The examples in (474) illustrate a final difference: whereas coordination of possessive pronouns and/or genitive noun phrases gives rise to a marked result, coordination of pronouns and noun phrases within the van-PP is easily possible.

It may be interesting to note that the differences between the possessive pronouns and the postnominal van-PP containing a personal pronoun neatly correspond to those between the so-called strong and weak possessive pronouns discussed by Cardinaletti (1998); see Alexiadou et al. (2007: 569-70) for a brief discussion of the relevant Italian data.