Nominal possessive genitive in the speech of the Romanija plateau

This paper analyzes the use of the genitive case of nouns, which is a syntactic formalizer of possessive meaning, functioning as a non-congruent attribute or adnominal possessive determiner, based on a dialectal corpus collected from the area of the Romanija Plateau. It examines separately the syntactic-semantic features of each structural form of the nominal possessive genitive ? as an independent case, as a case blocked by the preposition (?D or U) and as a case blocked by an obligatory determiner. Within each structural genitive form, semantic types of possession are identified based on the lexical meaning of the entities functioning as the subject and object of possession, with three types realized: proprietative (true), reciprocative and partitive possession. The genitive blocked by an obligatory determiner stands out in the speech of the Romanija Plateau as the primary syntactic formalizer of proprietative and reciprocative possession. The independent genitive acts as a formalizer of the same types of possession only when it is lexicalized through surnames ending in -ic, and in the reciprocative cases involving enumeration. The genitive blocked by the preposition ?D, followed by an obligatory determiner, occurs as a form competitive to the primary syntactic formalizer of reciprocative, and, potentially, proprietative possession. The segment of partitive possessivity is shared by genitive constructions with the prepositions ?D and U, where the former has the additional component of separation, and the latter emphasizes the inseparable connection between a part and the whole, while the independent genitive, in phrases such as noga stola (?the leg of a table?), is absent. Unlike the construction U + personal pronoun genitive, the construction U + noun genitive plays a minor role among possessive formalizers. A survey of the dialectal area confirms that the speech of the Romanija Plateau belongs to the western branch of the Stokavian dialects, as well as to the transitional dialects of the Herzegovinian?Krajina dialect.