Genitive case

In grammar, genitive (abbreviated gen; also called the possessive case or second case) is the grammatical case that marks a noun as modifying another noun. It often marks a noun as being the possessor of another noun; however, it can also indicate various other relationships than possession: certain verbs may take arguments in the genitive case, and it may have adverbial uses (see Adverbial genitive).

Placing the modifying noun in the genitive case is one way to indicate that two nouns are related in a genitive construction. Modern English typically does not morphologically mark nouns for a genitive case in order to indicate a genitive construction; instead, it uses either the 's clitic or a preposition (usually of). However, the personal pronouns do have distinct possessive forms. There are various other ways to indicate a genitive construction, as well. For example, many Afroasiatic languages place the head noun (rather than the modifying noun) in the construct state.

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 case):
  • 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")

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.

Many languages have a genitive case, including Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Basque, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, German, Greek, Icelandic, Irish, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Sanskrit, Scottish Gaelic, Turkish and all Slavic languages except Bulgarian and Macedonian. English does not have a proper genitive case, but a possessive ending, -’s, although some pronouns have irregular possessive forms which may more commonly be described as genitives; see English possessive.

English

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 pronoun forms such as his, theirs, 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 attaches to the end of a noun phrase and not necessarily to the head noun itself, as in the king of Spain's daughter, not the king's of Spain daughter as would be expected if -'s were a case inflection on the noun king (and as was done in older forms of English).

For details, see English possessive.

Finnic genitives and accusatives

Finnic languages (Finnish, Estonian) 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, 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.

German

The genitive case is used in the German language to show possession. For example:

• das Buch der Schülerin (the book of the schoolgirl) - Feminine
• das Buch des Schülers (the book of the schoolboy) - Masculine

An s is simply added to the end of the name if the identity of the possessor is specified. For example:

• Claudias Buch (Claudia's book)

There is also a genitive case with German pronouns such as 'dein' (your) and 'mein' (my).

The genitive case is also used for objects of some prepositions (e.g. trotz [despite], wegen [because of], [an]statt [instead of], während [during]), and is required as the case of the direct object for some verbs (e.g. gedenken, sich erfreuen, bedürfen; Usage: wir gedachten der Verstorbenen - We remembered the dead; wir erfreuen uns des schönen Wetters - We're happy about the nice weather.).

All of the articles change in the genitive case.

	Masculine	Feminine	Neuter	Plural
Definite article	des	der	des	der
Indefinite article	eines	einer	eines	(no article)

Adjective endings in genitive case:

	Masculine	Feminine	Neuter	Plural
Definite article	-en	-en	-en	-en
Indefinite Article	-en	-en	-en	-en
No article	-en	-er	-en	-er

The following prepositions can take the genitive: außerhalb, innerhalb, statt, trotz, während, wegen, and dank.

The genitive case is widely avoided in most colloquial and dialectal varieties of German. It is replaced by the dative case after verbs and prepositions, and by means of the preposition von ("of") in other contexts. However, this usage is not accepted in the written standard language.

Japanese

The Japanese possessive is constructed by using the suffix -no 〜の to make the genitive case. 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).

Korean

The possessive in Korean can be formed using the ending -ui '의'.

This is a car. igeoseun jadongchayeyo. 이것은 자동차예요.

This is the man's car. igeoseun geu namja-ui jadongchayeyo. 이것은 그 남자의 자동차예요.

Latin

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 English name. It is not capitalized because it is the second part of a scientific 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.
• Modus operandi, which can be translated to English as 'mode of operation', in which operandi is a singular genitive noun (i.e. 'of operation'), not a plural of operandus as is sometimes mistakenly assumed.

Irish

The Irish language also utilises a genitive case. For example in the phrase: "bean an tí" (woman of the house), "teach" translates as "house", but "tí" is the genitive case version of 'teach'. This case is used to describe something "of the", and only the word following "of the" changes into the 'Tuiseal Ginideach' (genitive case). It is not commonly found, but other examples include "barr an cnoic", (top of the hill), where "cnoc" would be "hill", but is changed to "cnoic".

Semitic languages

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

Akkadian

Nominative: šarrum (king)

Genitive: aššat šarrim (wife of king = king's wife)

Arabic

Called المجرور al-majrūr (meaning "dragged") in Arabic, the Genitive case functions both as an indication of ownership (ex. the door of the house) and for nouns following a preposition.

Nominative: بيت baytun (a house)

Genitive: باب بيت bābu baytin (the door of a house) باب البيت bābu l-bayti (the door of the house)

The Arabic genitive marking also appears after prepositions.

e.g. باب لبيت bābun li-baytin (a door for a house)

The Semitic genitive should not be confused with the pronominal possessive suffixes that exist in all the Semitic languages

e.g. Arabic بيتي bayt-ī (my house) كتابك kitābu-ka (your [masc.] book).

Slavic languages

In Slavic languages such as Russian, Serbian, Croatian, Polish, etc., both nouns and adjectives reflect the genitive case by using a variety of endings depending on the word's lexical category, its gender, and number (singular or plural).

Possessives

To indicate possession, the ending of the noun indicating the possessor changes to а, я, ы or и, depending on the word's ending in the nominative case. For example:

Nominative: "Вот Антон" ("Here is Anton").

Genitive: "Вот карандаш Антона" ("Here is Anton's pencil").

Possessives can also be formed by the construction "У [subject] есть [object]":

Nominative: "Вот Сергей" ("Here is Sergei").

Genitive: "У Сергея есть карандаш" ("Sergei has a pencil").

In sentences where the possessor includes an associated pronoun, the pronoun also changes:

Nominative: "Вот мой брат" ("Here is my brother").

Genitive: "У моего брата есть карандаш" ("My brother has a pencil").

And in sentences denoting negative possession, the ending of the object noun also changes:

Nominative: "Вот Ирина" ("Here is Irina").

Genitive: "У Ирины нет карандаша" ("Irina does not have a pencil").

To express negation

The genitive case is also used in sentences expressing negation, even when no possessive relationship is involved. The ending of the subject noun changes just as it does in possessive sentences:

Nominative: "Мария дома?" ("Is Maria at home?").

Genitive: "Марии нет дома" ("Maria is not at home," literally, "Of Maria there is none at home.").

Use of genitive for negation is obligatory in Slovene, Polish and Old Church Slavonic. Russian, Belarussian and Ukrainian optionally employ genitive for negation. In Czech, the negative genitive is perceived as archaic, as it is in Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian.

Partial direct object

The genitive case is used with some verbs and mass nouns to indicate that the action covers only a part of the direct object (having a function of non-existing partitive case), whereas similar constructions using the Accusative case denote full coverage. Compare the sentences:

Genitive: "Я выпил воды" ("I drank water," i.e. "I drank some water, part of the water available")

Accusative: "Я выпил воду ("I drank the water," i.e. "I drank all the water, all the water in question")

Prepositional constructions

The genitive case is also used in many prepositional constructions.

• Czech prepositions using genitive case: od (from), z, ze (from), do (into), bez (without), kromě (excepting), místo (instead of), podle (after, according to), podél (along), okolo (around), u (near, by), vedle (beside), během (during), pomocí (using, by the help of), stran (as regards) etc.

Turkish

The Turkish possessive is constructed using two suffixes: a genitive case for the possessor and a possessive suffix for the possessed object. For example:

Nominative: Kadın ('woman'); ayakkabı ('shoe')

Genitive: Kadının ayakkabısı ('the woman's shoe')

Albanian

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

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

Genetive: 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').

See also

• Genitive construction
• Possessive case

External links

• German genitive case A lesson covering the genitive case in the German language
• Russian genitive: [1], [2], [3]
• Genitive Case In Arabic