Syntactic and Semantic Adnominal Genitive

In this study we present a fresh look at an old topic of noun phrase syntax which is the genitive case in German and English. ∗ We argue that genitive in German is a cover term for two distinct phenomena which we call syntactic and semantic genitive. By syntactic genitive we mean the realisation of a syntactic argument which is licensed by genitive case. Semantic genitive, on the other hand, adds semantic content to the construction it occurs in. It expresses a semantic relation which holds between the genitive and the head-noun of the whole DP. This distinction also accounts for the varying distribution of genitive in German and English: while German exhibits both types of genitive, English does not have syntactic genitive. Genitive in English only serves to express a semantic relation. Apart from the distinction between syntactic and semantic genitive, we argue for a further syntactic distinction between prenominal and postnominal genitives in German, taking the former to be D 0 -heads and the latter DPs. Again, English differs from German in that both, pre- and postnominal genitives are phrasal. The paper is structured as follows. In section 2, we identify the two positions for genitive in German, the pre- and the postnominal one. In section 3, we raise a number of problems for existent analyses which treat pre- and postnominal genitives as essentially alike. We refer to these under the label Symmetric Analysis. In section 4 we present our analysis of German prenominal genitive as a syntactic D-head. Semantically, it modifies the head-noun of the whole genitive expression. In section 5, we analyse postnominal genitives. These do not form a uniform class but can be analysed as either arguments (syntactic genitive) or modifiers (semantic genitive) depending on the semantic type of the headnoun. Section 6 compares our findings for German with the English facts. The main difference between the two languages is argued to lie in the absence of syntactic genitive in English. Finally, in section 7 we discuss some open problems before concluding.