As was illustrated in Section 5.2.2.1, sub IV, the possessive pronouns differ from the personal pronouns in allowing an antecedent in the same clause. This is shown again by means of the examples in (434): whereas the third person feminine possessive pronoun haar'her' in (434a) can be interpreted as coreferential with the subject of its minimal clause, this is impossible for the referential personal pronoun haar in (434b); in that example the intended coreferential reading can only be expressed by means of the reflexive personal pronoun zichzelf'herself'. In the examples below, coreference is indicated by italics.

The referential possessive pronouns differ from the reflexive pronouns, however, in not requiring an antecedent in the same clause. This will become clear by comparing the two examples in (435).

In fact, the examples in (436) show that the referential possessive, like the personal pronoun, need not have an antecedent within the sentence at all, but can also be used anaphorically, in which case it refers to some active topic in the discourse, or deictically, in which case the referent of the pronoun is present in the situation in which the sentence is uttered.

      The binding properties of the third person pronouns do not change if we substitute the weak form for the strong form: the pronoun can then still be bound in its minimal clause, as in (434a), or remain free in it, as in (435a) and (436a). This is different, however, with the strong and weak form of the plural second person possessive pronoun, jullie and je, which do have different binding properties. The weak form is special in that it can only be used if an antecedent can be found in its minimal clause, as in (437a); if the personal and possessive pronoun are adjacent, as in (437b), the use of the weak form is even strongly preferred, which may be due to the fact that this avoids the repetition of two homophonous words.

However, if the pronoun does not have an antecedent in its minimal clause, that is, if the antecedent is in a matrix clause or not expressed within the sentence, as in (438), the use of the weak plural pronoun je gives rise to severely degraded results. Since, to our knowledge, this has not yet been extensively discussed in the literature, we will not digress on this issue any further.

Just like third person personal pronouns, third person possessive pronouns have special properties with regard to their antecedent. We start with a discussion of zijn'his', which can take the indefinite/generic pronoun men'one' as its antecedent. This is followed by a discussion of third person possessive pronouns that take a quantified or generic antecedent. We will show that the behavior of these third person possessive pronouns is essentially identical to that of the reflexive personal pronoun zichzelf'himself' if the antecedent is in the same clause, and to that of the personal pronoun hem'him' in the remaining cases.

In some cases, bound possessive pronouns can be modified by the element eigen. Consider the examples in (447): the addition of eigen to the bound pronoun zijn leads to a weird result in (447a&b), whereas the addition is fully acceptable in (447c). This seems to be related to the interpretation of these examples when eigen is absent: examples (447a&b) without eigen must be construed with the noun phrase acting as the possessor of the body parts mentioned in the PPs, whereas (447b) is ambiguous between this reading and a reading in which it is a body part of some other person. Unstressed eigen can be used to disambiguate the latter example.

Nevertheless, it seems impossible to fully account for the insertion of eigen by appealing to the desire to avoid ambiguity; the examples in (448) are both unambiguous without eigen, but still a contrast similar to that found in (447) can be observed. Perhaps the difference is related to the fact that the PP in (448a) can be left implicit, whereas the one in (448b) cannot.

Occasionally, eigen can even be used to make a reading available that is not available without it. In example (449a), for example, the possessive pronoun is normally interpreted not as referring to the subject of the clause, but to some other person in domain D. The addition of unstressed eigen blocks this reading in favor of a reading in which the subject of the clause does act as the antecedent of the possessive pronoun.