Lesson 4: Non-Verbal Modifiers
The Genitive
The Genitive encompasses all of the English possessive adjectives, along with all prepositional phrases using the preposition “of.”¹ Once again, understand that you will not find this category of genitive in a normal English grammar. But this grammatical category most certainly is present in Hebrew (construct form) and Greek (the genitive case), and so we want to see through the English to this important feature of the original languages.
What does a Genitive do?
We have already touched on two of the ways a genitive can work—that of actual possession of something, and that of being related to someone. But that is not all. In fact, there are 19 different genitive relationships! But don’t worry…you do not need to know the different genitive relationships for this course. We will simply label them all as genitives with Gen and diagram them using the non-verbal shelf (as with prepositional phrases). Let’s look at examples.
In our first example sentence, we have a possessive pronoun adjective “your.” It is labeled Gen and diagrammed by itself on the non-verbal shelf under the word that it modifies.
Here we have the possessive noun adjective “Paul’s” in the middle of a prepositional phrase. We label “Paul’s” as a genitive and diagram it on the non-verbal shelf attached under the word “mom,” which it is modifying. Notice that this sentence is an imperative (command) sentence. It has an implied subject pronoun of “you,” and the verb “sit” is intransitive since what follows it is a prepositional phrase, not a direct object.
For our third example we have a line from Psalm 8, using the preposition “of.” There is a lot to see here! First, notice how, as our sentences become longer and more complicated, our diagrams become much more useful in showing us what is our base sentence structure and what is an “add on.” The base sentence is “You have given him dominion,” (S-Vt-IO-DO). Then we have three non-verbal shelves, showing us the prepositional phrase “over the works,” the genitive phrase “of hands”, and a last shelf showing the genitive possessive pronoun adjective “your.” Notice that for the genitive, we do not use an object shelf. There is no genitive “object,” but rather we consider both the preposition “of” and the following noun to all be the genitive. So “of hands” all sits together with no break.
That is all that you need to know about the genitive for this grammar course. However if you are interested in looking more deeply into the genitive, an in-depth discussion of the different relationships can be accessed in lesson 5 of the Phrasing course. And here is the Genitive Relationships cheat sheet from the Phrasing course, which you might find helpful in digging deeper.
