Possessive Construction

(1) Genitive construction, a type of nominal attributive construction that signifies possession in the broad sense, including ownership and the relation of a part to a whole.

In different languages, the possessive construction is transmitted by various formal means—inflection or suffix, including those of a pronominal nature; preposition; and word order. Several types of possessive constructions are often distinguished in one language, the difference between them reflecting the difference in the nature of the possession. Depending on the type of language, either the determining or the determined member of a possessive construction may be indicated by the formal marker.

(2) In some theories of syntax, such as I. I. Meshchaninov’s, a special sentence construction that conveys the possession relationship.