Possessive pronouns refer to an object (or person) by identifying its possessor. They lexically indicate the person and number of the possessor, and like other pronouns they are inflected to indicate the gender and number of their referent. This is a key difference from English: in English, possessive pronouns are inflected to indicate the gender and number of their antecedent — e.g., in "the tables are his", the form "his" indicates that the antecedent (the possessor) is masculine singular, whereas in the French "les tables sont les siennes", "siennes" or its base form "sien" indicates that the antecedent is third person singular but of unspecified gender while the inflection "-nes" indicates that the possessed noun "table" is feminine plural.