(By Johanna Nichols and Balthasar Bickel): "Many languages have more than one way of forming possessive noun phrases. English, for example, has a choice between the "Saxon genitive" (Mary's house, the director's office, the day's end) and the "Norman genitive" (the office of the director, the end of the month), conditioned in part by the part of speech and semantics of the possessor but with considerable overlap and stylistic variation. ❡
In contrast, many languages have an opposition of two (or sometimes more) forms of possessive marking whose choice is conditioned not by semantics or style, as in English, but lexically; and conditioned not by properties of the possessor but by the possessed noun, i.e. by the head noun in the construction. (The possessed nouns in the English examples above are house, office, and end.)...❡
This contrast of two formal types of possession, determined by the possessed noun, is possessive classification. We use the terms possessive and possession, as is traditional, to refer to all kinds of adnominal constructions regardless of whether the semantics is literal possession. We use the term classification because the marking of possession in examples like (1) divides, or classifies, the nouns of Mesa Grande Diegueño into two sets: those that behave grammatically in possessive NPs like 'mother' and those that behave like 'house'."