Re: Possessive and Genitive

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003 14:39:48 -0400, "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
wrote:

>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.
There are also instances where the dative case is used to express
possession ... I'm thinking of a specific example from "Teach Yourself
Serbo-Croat" -- "zeleni im kapci" (green they-DAT shutters, i.e., "green
[are] their shutters"; the genitive of "they" is "ih"). (I think I might
use the dative case for possession in one or more of my new Zireen langs.)

I suppose it's like the difference between "patient" and "accusative" --
one is semantic and the other is grammatical, and while there is some
overlap between them, it depends on the language. The genitive case in some
languages can be used for certain expressions of quantity (like "millions
of dollars" in English), which don't seem to have much in common with
possession, and to mark the subject of a relative clause in Japanese.

I wonder if one reason the English possessive isn't labeled as a "genitive"
is that English often uses "of" in cases where other languages would use
the genitive case?

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