Genitive

The syntactic functions and/or semantic roles encoded by the A.Gk. genitive do not coincide precisely with the uses of the genitive in other Indo-European languages. Indeed, the A.Gk. genitive is a result of IE genitive-ablative merging and it combines the functions of both cases comprising, besides possessive and partitive meanings (typically expressed by the genitive in IE languages), spatial meanings (typically expressed by the ablative in IE languages). The genitive is the unmarked adnominal case signalling functional dependency relations between a head and its modifier. At the clause level, the functional extension of the genitive covers a broad spectrum of functions and roles including subject and direct object, the second argument of intransitive verbs. This article provides a brief and necessarily selective overview of the main grammatical and semantic uses of the genitive.