genitivissa

Genitivissa is a fictional or hypothetical linguistic term used in pedagogical materials and conlang communities to illustrate a system of possessive marking that encodes nested or multi-layer ownership. The concept combines the idea of a genitive relation with an explicit affixal or clitic marker, allowing possessive relations to be shown directly on the nouns involved.

In genitivissa-style systems, morphological markers can attach to the possessed noun, the possessor noun, or both. Variants may use suffixes, clitics, or separate particles, and they can stack to signal multiple levels of ownership. The approach is often contrasted with periphrastic possessives (such as a simple “of” phrase) and with languages that rely on determiner or word-order strategies to express possession. Genitivissa is mainly discussed in typology demonstrations, language-creation exercises, and classroom contexts to explore how nested possession could be expressed morphologically and how such marking interacts with other elements of a noun phrase (determiners, numerals, adjectives, etc.).

Example (schematic): in a language described with genitivissa, the phrase “the teacher’s student’s notebook” might involve a marker on the notebook to indicate the inner possessive (student of) and an additional marker on the teacher to indicate the outer possessive, with the exact position and form varying by variant.

See also: genitive case, possessive constructions, nested possession, morphological agreement, conlangs.