Detail #137, pt4: The Genitive Participle

Again, the genitive is not (normally) a verbal argument, so its use suffers from much the same problems as the comparative object participle does. However, there are some things we can do with it:

• 'locking' which argument(s) can be possessed; something high up in the accessibility hierarchy seems reasonable. Subjects and objects at most? We might not even need to distinguish when it's a passive or active - maybe that's lexically restricted by the verbs themselves, maybe it's assumed that context or type of noun involved disambiguates.
• In some languages, certain verbs take genitive arguments for subjects or objects, c.f. Finnish 'täytyy' ('has to', 'must') takes genitive subjects, Russian бояться ('to fear') takes genitive objects (which for animate masculine is identical to accusative, but for other nouns it's distinct from the accusative). For a language that has lots of genitives all over the place, look at Icelandic. (It has all its cases all over the place.) For such a language, verbs that take genitive arguments could reasonably well take such a participle too. gen-бояться-participle = who is feared, gen-täytyy-participle = who has to. Let us involve such a thing in the language.

So, we have a few exceptional verbs, and the rest we deal with according to the previous approach: contextual or lexical disambiguation. However, possessing something is also in a way having control over it. So, 

• fish(verb)-gen.participle John - John, who is an authority on fishing? John, who decides on issues pertaining to fishing? John, who is the boss of the fishermen? John, who is a damn good fisherman
• pray-gen.participle priest - the priest who has the prayer - the priest who conducts us in prayer, etc

Thus, essentially, the genitive participle becomes a bit causative-like, but with complications: not one who causes a thing, but one that has power over a thing. Thus, the term for a doctor is heal-gen.participle, a mathematician is a count-gen.participle (unlike an accountant, who is count-active.participle). Thus also socially powerful persons have genitive participles for their occupations even if a regular active or passive or even recipient participle would be semantically and syntactically reasonable.

Some verbs, however, where the type of subject or object is very clear, the implication is more genuinely genitive-like:

• Tim was birth-gen.participle = Tim's wife has just given birth

Almost invariably, die-gen.participle marks the death of the spouse; if the noun is a clan, it is the death of a clan leader - dead-gen.participle clan = a clan whose leader has died. A number of participles mark family-related things when the genitive participle is used, and the hierarchy tends to be one of political significance. Likewise, verbs that normally have cattle as subjects - give birth to calves, give birth to sheep, run off (of cattle), since the type of subject can be assumed and large portions of the population own cattle.