Laudator Temporis Acti

My friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, objects to some remarks I made about the genitive case. I concede his first point, but not his second. For there to be a genuine instance of the subjective genitive or objective genitive, you must be able to identify the verb inherent in the noun governing the genitive. Here are two explanations.

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Guy L. Cooper III, Attic Greek Prose Syntax (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), following K.W. Krüger, § 47.7.1:

There is often a distinctly verbal relation between the adnominal genitive and its substantive .... For the analysis of all such passages where substantive and adnominal genitive stand in a semi-verbal relation to one another it is useful to think of the syntactic complex they form as a condensed or abbreviated sentence, and then to expand the statement into a fuller form. If the adnominal genitive in the abbreviated statement corresponds to the subject in the full sentence, the adnominal genitive is referred to as a subjective genitive. If the adnominal genitive in the abbreviated sentence corresponds to the object in the full sentence, it is referred to as an objective genitive.

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James Mountford, 'Bradley's Arnold' Latin Prose Composition (1938; rpt. New York: David McKay, 1967), § 299:

The genitive case always implies a close relation between the noun in that case and another noun.

(i) Sometimes that relation is such that, if the other noun were converted into a verb, the word now in the genitive would become the subject of that verb.

Thus: post fugam Pompeii = postquam fugit Pompeius.

Such a genitive is called subjective.

(ii) Sometimes the relation of a genitive to its governing noun resembles that of an object to its verb.

Thus: propter mortis timorem = quod mortem timuit.

Such a genitive is called objective.

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These principles apply to any language with subjective and objective genitives, not just Greek and Latin.