The genitive case in Polish: a thing or a relation?
A highly inflectional language such as Polish marks the genitive case on the
noun and an accompanying adjective in many different contexts. Owing to the
great number and diversity of those contexts, it is difficult to establish the
meaning(s) of this category as well as the category membership of a genitive-marked
element.
The present analysis rejects the division into "grammatical" (i.e.
syntactic) cases (i.e. nominative, accusative, and genitive) as opposed to "concrete"
(i.e. semantic) cases (e.g. dative, instrumental), as viewed in Kurylowicz (1964:
32). Instead, all cases are understood here as semantically definable and their
semantic content as ranging from more to less definite.
The genitive case, referred to in Taylor (1996) as a noun, shows characteristics
of a relational category, despite its nominal behavior in the sentence (e.g.
the object of a verb or a preposition). I will look closely at numerous instantiations
of the genitive and postulate a more complex profile than that of a thing.
I agree with Nikiforidou (1991) who proposes that the genitive should be viewed
as a case of structured polysemy as opposed to accidental homonymy or a case
of abstract, general single meaning.
However, certain reservations can be expressed about treating the various
and quite diverse meanings as metaphorical and about those meanings being related
through metaphor.
I observe that the genitive case, at least in one Slavonic language, can be
defined by means of a very general semantic characterization. That characterization
approximates Langacker's notion of a reference point (Langacker
1995). All cases studied exhibit some or all of the following abstract features:
absence, aiming at something absent (or a part of something larger), some (unspecified)
dominion, indefiniteness, underspecification, unknown quantity, directionality
toward an unspecified area, etc. Abstract as it is, the category in the genitive
case serves as a relation between a point of access to a region, area, or thing
which is unspecified, unknown or absent from the scene altogether.
As for category membership, I analyze categories in the genitive case as atemporal
relations rather than things. As opposed to a relational noun, such as uncle,
which is complete semantically and grammatically, a category in the genitive
is profiled as an incomplete atemporal relation. In the most schematic characterization,
one relational figure (trajector) is left unspecified, but remains fairly prominent
in the background. The other relational figure (landmark) is profiled together
with a relation leading to the unprofiled, or else profiled but unspecified,
trajector. Naturally, there are certain departures from this abstract characterization.
Nevertheless, a careful analysis of the various instantiations of the genitive
suggests a relational profile for this category.
References:
Kurylowicz, Jerzy. 1964. The inflectional categories of Indo-European. Heidelberg:
Carl Winter, Universitätsverlag.
Langacker, Ronald W. 1995. "Possession and possessive constructions,"
in John R. Taylor & Robert E. MacLaury (eds.), Language and the cognitive
construal of the world. (Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs, 82)
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 51-79.
Nikiforidou, Kiki. 1991. "The meanings of the genitive: A case study
in semantic structure and semantic change." Cognitive Linguistics 2, 149-205.
Taylor, John R. 1996. Possessives in English. An exploration in cognitive
grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press