The word genitive and the phrase genitive. The semantic types of the genitive. The correlation of the noun case and the pronoun case

- Two subtypes of the genitive are to be recognized: the word genitive (the principal type) and the phrase genitive (the minor type). Since similar meanings can be rendered in English by prepositional constructions, the genitive may be regarded as additional to the syntactic system of prepositional phrases;

The following semantic subtypes of the genitive can be distinguished:

1. the genitive of possessor (of inorganic possession), e.g.: Tom’s toy; this type of meaning can be explicitly demonstrated by a special transformational diagnostic test: Tom’s toy - the toy belongs to Tom;

2. the genitive of the whole (of organic possession), e.g.: Tom’s hand - the hand is a part of Tom;

2a. the genitive of received qualification, e.g.: Tom’s vanity - vanity is the peculiar feature of Tom;

3. the genitive of agent (or subject of action), e.g.: Tom’s actions -à Tom acts;

3a. the genitive of author, e.g.: Dickens’s novels - the novels written by Dickens;

4. the genitive of patient (or object of action), e.g.: the hostages’ release - the hostages were released;

5. the genitive of destination, e.g.: women’s underwear à underwear for women;

6. the genitive of qualification, e.g.: a girl’s voice - the voice characteristic of a girl, peculiar to a girl; 6a. the genitive of comparison, e.g.: a cock’s self-confidence - self-confidence like that of a cock, resembling the self-confidence of a cock;

7. the adverbial genitive (usually of place and time modification), e.g.: yesterday’s talks - the talks that took place yesterday;

8. the genitive of quantity, e.g.: a three miles’ distance from here.

- As a separate type of genitive the so-called “absolute genitive” is distinguished, when the noun in the genitive case is used independently, not as an attribute of another noun, e.g.: at the baker’s, at Tom’s. These are the cases of lexicalized ellipses in word-combinations: at the baker’s shop, at Tom’s place.

- The given semantic description of the genitive is not exhaustive; there may be further subdivisions and generalizations. Sometimes all the semantic types of the genitive are united into two large groups: those denoting possession and those denoting qualification. This subdivision is grammatically relevant, because in the first case the articles and attributes modify the noun in the genitive case itself, e.g.: the young man’s son, Byron’s last poem, while in the second case they modify the noun which follows the one in the genitive case, e.g.: a pleasant five minutes’ walk.

As is clear from the description given, the genitive does not always denote “possession”; that is why the term “genitive” is more accurate than the term “possessive”, though both of them are widely used in linguistics.

- The category of case of nouns is traditionally treated in correlation with the case of personal pronouns, which substitute for nouns. The following four case forms of personal pronouns are traditionally recognized: 1) the nominative case (I, we, you, he, etc.), 2) the objective case (me, us, you, him, etc.); possessive pronouns are added in two forms: 3) the conjoint form (my, our, your, his, etc.) and 4) the absolute form (mine, ours, yours, his, etc.). The more advanced approach states that these forms no longer constitute the case forms of pronouns, because, first, they are incompatible with the system of noun cases (the common case vs. the genitive case), and, second, they are forms of the same pronouns, or individual groups of words, united in a lexical paradigmatic series, e.g.: I – me – my – mine, we – us – our – ours, etc. The pronoun declension system has completely disintegrated along with the inflectional declensional system of the noun case.

There were attempts in the history of linguistics to use the correlation of the pronoun case system and the noun case system to prove the existence or the absence of the category of case of nouns. But neither the acceptance of the pronoun case nor its rejection can prove the existence or the absence of the noun case category: the category of case of nouns cannot be treated as depending upon the case system of pronouns, since pronouns substitute for nouns, reflecting their categories, and not vice versa.

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