ABSTRACT
Morphological case found in many languages (e.g. Latin, Russian, German) whose primary function is to mark an attribute of a noun. The most usual type of attribute is one of possession, which is why the genitive is often called a possessive marker in the literature on universals. Other syntactic functions of noun phrases in the genitive case include the oblique object of a verb or an adjective (Ger. Philip ist sich seines Fehlers bewusst ‘Philip is aware of his mistake’; for further uses, see Teubert 1979), (Ger. eines Tages ‘one day’), or predicative (Ger. des Teufels sein ‘to be of the devil’). Some prepositions in these languages can require the genitive as well (Ger. wegen des Regens ‘because of the rain’). Genitive attributes are sometimes classified, following Latin grammars according to the semantic relation to the modified noun: (a) subject genitive: the sleep of a child (cf. the subject-predicate relationship in A child sleeps); (b) object genitive: the distribution of goods (cf. the object-predicate relationship: Someone distributes goods); (c) possessive genitive: the senator’s hat (possessive relationship: The senator has a hat); (d) partitive genitive: Ger. die Hälfte meines Kuchens ‘half of my cake’.
