Genitiivis

Genitiivis is a linguistic term used to refer to the genitive case, a grammatical category that marks a noun as related to another noun, most commonly to express possession, attribution, or origin. The genitive can indicate ownership, part-whole relationships, source, or other close associations between nouns.

Realization of the genitive varies across languages. In some languages, the genitive is formed by attaching a suffix, prefix, or clitic to the possessor noun. Others use a dedicated preposition or a periphrastic construction. For example, English often expresses possession with the possessive clitic ’s or with the preposition of (the book of John). In languages with a abstract genitive case, a noun may change form and interact with determiners or articles to signal ownership. In Finnic and other Uralic languages, genitive marking is frequently achieved through noun inflection rather than a separate word, while still serving the same core functions of possession and association.

Functions of the genitive include possession, part-whole relations (the lid of the bottle), material, source, and various forms of close association between nouns. It can also participate in measurements, classifications, and nominal modifiers, depending on the language's syntax and morphology.

Typology and variation are common: some languages have a distinct genitive case with its own morphology, others rely on possessive adjectives or periphrastic constructions, and some combine strategies. The genitive interacts with issues such as definiteness, animacy, and word order, reflecting broader typological patterns in a language family or individual language.

The term Genitiivis traces to the broader Latin-based naming of genitive forms and is used in historical and descriptive linguistics to discuss possession and relational marking across languages.