Re: Terminology question

[J Martin Rushton]

Err, we're back to a terminology question.  Strictly speaking possession 
is one use of the more general genitive which gives a relationship, 
consider:

Give me William's book   - The book owned by William.
Let's go to John's local - The pub frequented by John.

Both are genitives, but only the first is possessive.  Evidently the 
term "possessive case" only came into use in C18, prior to that genitive 
had been universally used.  In short: "possessive case" is a limited 
subset of the grammatical genitive case.


On 20/06/2021 09:50, Kevin Barry wrote:
> > The problem is that in English we would say "the soldier's weapons", but
> > that's partly because we only have a genitive and not an ablative case.
>
> I think this is the possessive case, not genitive.

--
J Martin Rushton MBCS