Genitive case

Depending on the language, specific varieties of genitive-noun–main-noun relationships may include:

• possession (see possessive case, possessed case):
  • inalienable possession ("Janet's height", "Janet's existence", "Janet's long fingers")
  • alienable possession ("Janet's jacket", "Janet's drink")
  • relationship indicated by the noun being modified ("Janet's husband")
• composition (see Partitive):
  • substance ("a wheel of cheese")
  • elements ("a group of men")
  • source ("a portion of the food")
• participation in an action:
  • as an agent ("She benefited from her father's love") – this is called the subjective genitive (Compare "Her father loved her", where Her father is the subject.)
  • as a patient ("the love of music")  – this is called the objective genitive (Compare "She loves music", where music is the object.)
• origin ("men of Rome")
• reference ("the capital of the Republic" or "the Republic's capital")
• description ("man of honour", "day of reckoning")
• compounds ("doomsday" ("doom's day"), Scottish Gaelic "ball coise" = "football", where "coise" = gen. of "cas", "foot")
• apposition (Japanese 牛の角 (ushi no tsuno), "cow horn")

Depending on the language, some of the relationships mentioned above have their own distinct cases different from the genitive.

Possessive pronouns are distinct pronouns, found in Indo-European languages such as English, that function like pronouns inflected in the genitive. They are considered separate pronouns if contrasting to languages where pronouns are regularly inflected in the genitive. For example, English my is either a separate possessive adjective or an irregular genitive of I, while in Finnish, for example, minun is regularly agglutinated from minu- "I" and -n (genitive).

In some languages, nouns in the genitive case also agree in case with the nouns they modify (that is, it is marked for two cases). This phenomenon is called suffixaufnahme.

In some languages, nouns in the genitive case may be found in inclusio – that is, between the main noun's article and the noun itself.

Old English had a genitive case, which has left its mark in modern English in the form of the possessive ending 's (now sometimes referred to as the "Saxon genitive"), as well as possessive adjective forms such as his, their, etc., and in certain words derived from adverbial genitives such as once and afterwards. (Other Old English case markers have generally disappeared completely.) The modern English possessive forms are not normally considered to represent a grammatical case, although they are sometimes referred to as genitives or as belonging to a possessive case. One of the reasons that the status of ’s as a case ending is often rejected is that it does not behave as such, but rather as a clitic marking that indicates that a dependency relationship exists between phrases. One can say the King's war, but also the King of France's war, where the genitive marker is attached to the full noun phrase the King of France, whereas case markers are normally attached to the head of a phrase. In languages having a true genitive case, such as Old English, this example may be expressed as þes cynges wyrre of France,[4] literally "the King's war of France", with the ’s attaching to the King.

Finnic languages (Finnish, Estonian, etc.) have genitive cases.

In Finnish, prototypically the genitive is marked with -n, e.g. maa – maan "country – of the country". The stem may change, however, with consonant gradation and other reasons. For example, in certain words ending in consonants, -e- is added, e.g. mies – miehen "man – of the man", and in some, but not all words ending in -i, the -i is changed to an -e-, to give -en, e.g. lumi – lumen "snow – of the snow". The genitive is used extensively, with animate and inanimate possessors. In addition to the genitive, there is also a partitive case (marked -ta/-tä or -a/-ä) used for expressing that something is a part of a larger mass, e.g. joukko miehiä "a group of men".

In Estonian, the genitive marker -n has elided with respect to Finnish. Thus, the genitive always ends with a vowel, and the singular genitive is sometimes (in a subset of words ending with a vocal in nominative) identical in form to nominative.

In Finnish, in addition to the uses mentioned above, there is a construct where the genitive is used to mark a surname. For example, Juhani Virtanen can be also expressed Virtasen Juhani ("Juhani of the Virtanens").

A complication in Finnic languages is that the accusative case -(e)n is homophonic to the genitive case. This case does not indicate possession, but is a syntactic marker for the object, additionally indicating that the action is telic (completed). In Estonian, it is often said that only a "genitive" exists. However, the cases have completely different functions, and the form of the accusative has developed from *-(e)m. (The same sound change has developed into a synchronic mutation of a final m into n in Finnish, e.g. genitive sydämen vs. nominative sydän.) This homophony has exceptions in Finnish, where a separate accusative -(e)t is found in pronouns, e.g. kenet "who (telic object)", vs. kenen "whose".

A difference is also observed in some of the related Sámi languages, where the pronouns and the plural of nouns in the genitive and accusative are easily distinguishable from each other, e.g., kuä'cǩǩmi "eagles' (genitive plural)" and kuä'cǩǩmid "eagles (accusative plural)" in Skolt Sami.

The ablative case of Indo-European was absorbed into the genitive in Classical Greek.[5] This added to the usages of the "genitive proper", the usages of the "ablatival genitive". The genitive occurs with verbs, adjectives, adverbs and prepositions.

The Hungarian genitive is constructed using the suffix -é.

• madár ('bird'); madáré ('bird's')

The genitive -é suffix is only used with the predicate of a sentence: it serves the role of mine, yours, hers, etc. The possessed object is left in the nominative case. For example:

• A csőr a madáré ('The beak is the bird's').

If the possessor is not the predicate of the sentence, the genitive is not used. Instead, the possessive suffixes (-(j)e or -(j)a in the third person singular, depending on vowel harmony) mark the possessed object. The possessor is left in the nominative if it directly precedes the possessed object (otherwise it takes a dative -nak/-nek suffix). For example:

• csőr ('beak'); csőre ('its beak')
• a madár csőre/csőre a madárnak ('the bird's beak')

In addition, the suffix -i ('of') is also used. For example:

• madár ('bird'); madári ('avian', 'of bird(s)')

The Japanese possessive is constructed by using the grammatical particle no の to make the genitive case.[6] For example:

Nominative: 猫 neko ('cat'); 手 te ('hand, paw')

Genitive: 猫の手 neko-no te ('cat's paw')

It also uses the suffix -na 〜な for adjectival noun; in some analyses adjectival nouns are simply nouns that take -na in the genitive, forming a complementary distribution (-no and -na being allomorphs).

The archaic genitive case particle -ga ～が is still retained in certain expressions, place names, and dialects. Possessive ga can also be written as a small ke (ヶ), for example in Kasumigaoka (霞ヶ丘).[7]

Typically, languages have nominative case nouns converting into genitive case. It has been found, however, that the Kansai dialect of Japanese will in rare cases allow accusative case to convert to genitive, if specific conditions are met in the clause in which the conversion appears. This is referred to as "Accusative-Genitive conversion."[8]

The genitive is one of the cases of nouns and pronouns in Latin. Latin genitives still have certain modern scientific uses:

• Scientific names of living things sometimes contain genitives, as in the plant name Buddleja davidii, meaning "David's buddleia". Here davidii is the genitive of Davidius, a Latinized version of the Hebrew name. It is not capitalized because it is the second part of a binomial name.
• Names of astronomical constellations are Latin, and the genitives of their names are used in naming objects in those constellations, as in the Bayer designation of stars. For example, the brightest star in the constellation Virgo is called Alpha Virginis, which is to say "Alpha of Virgo", as virginis is the genitive of virgō. Plural forms and adjectives also decline accordingly: plural Alpha Piscium (Pisces) and Alpha Canum Venaticorum (Canes Venatici) versus singular Alpha Piscis Austrini (Piscis Austrinus) and Alpha Canis Majoris (Canis Major). Astronomy manuals often list the genitive forms, as some are easy to get wrong even with a basic knowledge of Latin, e.g. Vela, which is a neuter plural not a feminine singular: Delta Velorum not *Delta Velae.
• Modus operandi, which can be translated to English as "mode of operation", in which operandi is a singular genitive gerund (i.e. "of operation"), not a plural of operandus as is sometimes mistakenly assumed.

The Irish language also uses a genitive case (tuiseal ginideach). For example, in the phrase bean an tí (woman of the house), tí is the genitive case of teach, meaning "house". Another example is barr an chnoic, "top of the hill", where cnoc means "hill", but is changed to chnoic, which also incorporates lenition.

In Mandarin Chinese, the genitive case is made by use of the particle 的 (de).[9]

However, about persons in relation to oneself, 的 is often dropped when the context allows for it to be easily understood.

Old Persian had a true genitive case inherited from Proto-Indo-European. By the time of Middle Persian, the genitive case had been lost and replaced by an analytical construction which is now called Ezāfe. This construction was inherited by New Persian, and was also later borrowed into numerous other Iranic, Turkic and Indo-Aryan languages of Western and South Asia.

Genitive case marking existed in Proto-Semitic, Akkadian, and Ugaritic. It indicated possession, and it is preserved today only in Arabic.

With the exception of Bulgarian and Macedonian, all Slavic languages decline the nouns and adjectives in accordance with the genitive case using a variety of endings depending on the word's lexical category, its gender, number (singular or plural) and in some cases meaning.

The Turkish genitive, formed with a genitive suffix for the possessor, is used in combination with a possessive for the possessed entity, formed with a possessive suffix. For example, in "my mother's mother", the possessor is "my mother", and the possessed entity is "[her] mother". In Turkish:

Nominative: anne ("mother");

First-person possessive: annem ("my mother");

Third-person possessive: annesi ("[someone]'s mother");

Genitive of annem: annemin ("my mother's");

Genitive and possessive combined: annemin annesi ("my mother's mother", i.e., "my maternal grandmother").

The genitive in Albanian is formed with the help of clitics. For example:

Nominative: libër ('book'); vajzë ('girl');

Genitive: libri i vajzës (the girl's book)

If the possessed object is masculine, the clitic is i. If the possessed object is feminine, the clitic is e. If the possessed object is plural, the clitic is e regardless of the gender.

The genitive is used with some prepositions: me anë ('by means of'), nga ana ('on behalf of', 'from the side of'), për arsye ('due to'), për shkak ('because of'), me përjashtim ('with the exception of'), në vend ('instead of').

The genitive in Armenian is generally formed by adding "-ի":

Nominative: աղջիկ ('girl'); գիրք ('book');

Genitive: աղջիկի գիրքը ("the girl's book").

However, there are certain words that are not formed this way. For example, words with ուն change to ան:

Nominative: տուն ('house'), Genitive: տան ("house's").

• Genitive construction
• Possessive case

• Karlsson, Fred (2018). Finnish - A Comprehensive Grammar. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-138-82104-0.
• Anhava, Jaakko (2015). "Criteria For Case Forms in Finnish and Hungarian Grammars". journal.fi. Helsinki: Finnish Scholarly Journals Online.

Look up genitive case in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• German genitive case A lesson covering the genitive case in the German language
• Russian genitive: , ,
• Genitive Case In Arabic