Re: Possessive and Genitive

On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 08:05:59PM +0200, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> Actually, if you want to be correct, you have to say that possessive forms
> are often used in non-possessive ways (what you described can be done in
> French with the possessive adjectives which are certainly not genitives).
> The fact that the genitive is often used like that says nothing.
I agree to a point.  The genitive case is indeed but one of
many ways of expressing the specific semantic relationship of
possessor/possessed.  There are many others - adjectives, pronouns,
prepositions, particles - and most of the time whatever construct
is used for possession has other uses as well.  From this point of view
the genitive is a special case of the possessive.

But in any given language which has both a genitive noun case and
another means of indicating possession, there are likely to be
applications of the genitive where it cannot be replaced by the
alternate possessive construct, where such restriction is
governed purely by the semantics of the application.  It is therefore
difficult to justify the application of the term "possessive" to such
uses of the genitive.  That is why I say that the possessive is also a
special case of the genitive.

In other words, as I said in my previous post, neither is a strict superset
of the other.  They mean different things, but there is a large amount
of overlap.

-Mark

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