adjectives - Is "a friend of his" a used phrase?


I know that a friend of mine is a used phrase, but is the phrase also used with other personal possessive adjectives?



I met a friend of his.




Answer



Here are some stats from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the British National Corpus, and Google:


                      COCA    BNC    Google

a friend of mine      1227    230    33.90M
a friend of his        274     53    25.30M   
a friend of hers       130     20     7.63M
a friend of ours        82     13    13.10M
a friend of theirs      25      3     1.82M

Average number of incidences per million words in different contexts (COCA):


           SPOKEN FICTION MAGAZINE NEWSPAPER ACADEMIC

...mine     6.08    3.10    3.30      1.35      .52
...his       .95    1.06     .56       .48      .18
...hers      .32     .73     .3        .14      .05
...ours      .51     .23     .15       .05      .02
...theirs    .08     .12     .02       .04      .04

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