Génitif

Génitif is the name given to a grammatical category used in many languages to mark a relationship between nouns, most commonly possession but also relation to origin, part-whole, quantity, or description. The term comes from Latin genitivus, itself derived from genus meaning birth, kind, origin, or stock. In languages that have a labeled case system, the genitive is typically realized on the noun, its article, or within the noun phrase as a marking of possession and related relationships.

Functions and usage vary across languages. The most familiar function is possession: a man’s car or the book of the author. The genitive can also express close association, material or content (a statue of marble, a cup of tea), part-whole relations, and sometimes origin or source (a wine of Bordeaux). In many languages, the genitive interacts with numerals, adjectives, and prepositions, and in analytic languages it may be expressed by prepositions rather than inflection. Some languages use a dedicated set of endings on nouns and determiners to signal the genitive, while others use word order or clitic forms.

Examples across languages illustrate the variety. German uses a rich genitive system with endings on nouns and articles, as in das Auto des Mannes (the man’s car). English lacks a true grammatical genitive as a case, relying instead on the possessive 's or of-phrases (the man’s car, the color of the car). Latin and Ancient Greek employ inflected genitive forms to express possession, attribution, and various relational meanings. In Russian and many Slavic languages, the genitive marks possession and is also used with numerals and in certain syntactic constructions.

In linguistic descriptions, Génitif is thus a broad label for how a language encodes relationships of nouns, with differences in form and function reflecting each language’s grammar system.