Grammatical cases: On the genitive in the Polish language

Abstract

The article discusses the issue of grammatical cases,
with a special reference to the genitive case in the Polish language. The first part of the article presents grammatical case as a linguistic phenomenon: it outlines the historical background to its recognition as a grammatical category characteristic of nominal phrases, focuses on the function and form of grammatical cases, and describes selected classifications of cases across classical and modern Indo-European languages. The following part of the article provides a concise description of the types of Polish genitive (divided into the adnominal and adverbial genitive). The description
is supplemented by textual examples from literature.
The final part of the article concerns the genitive
of negation, i.e. the linguistic phenomenon by which an accusative object (in affirmative sentences) is replaced with a genitive object (in negative ones). In modern Polish, the genitive of negation tends to decline.