Germanic Genitives

The Germanic languages exhibit several interesting developments with respect to genitive and ‘possession’. The genitive cannot be considered a structural case in line with the nominative or accusative, the function of which can often be expressed by word order alone. It has a very complex semantic status in its own right and shows several intersections with the semantics of the dative, also a formerly complex case. The transfer of possessive datives from Low German into the Mainland Scandinavian