genitivelike

Genitivelike is a term used in linguistics to describe possessive, attributional, or closely related noun–noun relations that are encoded in ways that resemble genitive constructions, without requiring a language to have a dedicated genitive case or a uniform genitive marker. It is a broad label that encompasses a variety of strategies across languages for signaling possession or association.

Common realizations include prepositional possessives such as English phrases with of (the roof of the house), affixal or clitic possessives as in the English possessive ’s (the man’s book), and noun–noun compounds that encode a possessive or associative relation. Other devices involve languages that express similar relationships through particles, case morphology, or syntactic order. For example, some languages use a genitive-like particle or a construct akin to iḍāfa in Semitic languages, where the relationship between the governing noun and the possessed noun is established without a single, uniform genitive marker.

Genitivelike is not a single grammatical category but a cross-linguistic phenomenon used to compare how different languages encode possession, attribution, and related relations. It helps distinguish true genitive case systems from alternative strategies that achieve similar meanings. The concept is particularly useful in linguistic typology and in discussions of how determiner and noun syntax interact across languages with diverse possessive strategies.