Genitivepluralists

Genitivepluralists is a term used in discussions of linguistics to describe researchers who study genitive plural marking across languages and its functional and historical dimensions. The label is not tied to a single institution but refers to a set of scholarly works that center on how genitive case interacts with number, possession, and construct relations in plural noun phrases.

The field examines questions such as how genitive plural forms are morphologically realized, how they differ from other plural strategies, and what semantic readings they encode (for example, possession, partitive, or aggregate readings). It also surveys typological distribution across language families, the diachronic paths by which genitive plural systems emerge or dissolve, and how genitive plural interacts with determiner systems and word order. Researchers compare languages with rich genitive systems to those with minimal or no distinct genitive plural to identify patterns of formation, allomorphy, and functional motivation.

Research methods employed by genitivepluralists include cross-linguistic typology, corpus-based statistics, historical-comparative analysis, and descriptive fieldwork. The approach often highlights languages such as Latin, Greek, German, and Russian to illustrate a range of genitive plural realizations, while also considering languages with little or no distinct genitive plural. While not a formal school, the concept informs broader debates about how possession, quantity, and relational meaning are encoded in noun phrases and how genitive systems interact with other grammatical categories.

See also: genitive case, plurality, morphology, syntax, linguistic typology.