Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics.pdf

A-Z 461genitiveMorphological case found in many languages (e.g. Latin, Russian, German) whoseprimary function is to mark an attribute of a noun. The most usual type of attribute isone of possession, which is why the genitive is often called a possessive marker in theliterature on universals. Other syntactic functions of noun phrases in the genitive caseinclude the oblique object of a verb or an adjective (Ger. Philip ist sich seines Fehlersbewusst ‘Philip is aware of his mistake’; for further uses, see Teubert 1979), (Ger. einesTages ‘one day’), or predicative (Ger. des Teufels sein ‘to be of the devil’). Someprepositions in these languages can require the genitive as well (Ger. wegen des Regens‘because of the rain’). Genitive attributes are sometimes classified, following Latingrammars 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) objectgenitive: the distribution of goods (cf. the object-predicate relationship: Someonedistributes goods); (c) possessive genitive: the senator’s hat (possessive relationship: Thesenator has a hat); (d) partitive genitive: Ger. die Hälfte meines Kuchens ‘half of mycake’.Historically the use of the genitive case in Indo-European languages has decreasedsignificantly; while it is fully active in the Slavic languages, its use has been reduced inGerman, and in many Romance languages it has been completely lost. In Old Englishthe genitive case was fully functional, while modern English preserves it mainly in thepossessive marker -s: Philip’s book. The term ‘genitive’ is also used for the functionexpressed by the genitive case, e.g. book of Philip.ReferencesAnttila, H. 1983. Zur geschichtlichen Entwicklung des Genitivobjekts im Deutschen. LinguistischeStudien 107. 97–113.Debrunner, A. 1940. Aus der Krankheitsgeschichte des Genitivs. Bern.Michaelis, C. 1980. Formale Bestimmung und Interpretation einer syntaktischen Relation: dasGenitivattribut im Deutschen. Doctoral dissertation, Berlin.Teubert, W. 1979. Valenz des Substantivs: attributive Ergänzungen und Angaben. Düsseldorf.Wellander, E. 1956. Zum Schwund des Genitivs. In Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zuBerlin (ed.), Fragen und Forschungen im Bereich der germanischen Philologie. Festgabe fürTh. Frings, Berlin. 156–72.case.genotypeA term in sem iotics borrowed from genetics by Šaumjan to describe the sum of inheritedproperties. This contrasts with phenotype, which refers to the external and apparent