A Critique of the Distinction between Nominal Genitives and Attributive Genitives

Tabibzadeh and Baradaran Hemmati (2015) argue that the Persian Genitive constructions can be divided into attributive genitives and nominal genitives based on six criteria including the possibility of displacing the nominal and attributive dependents, adding the plural suffix, and the possibility of scrambling or topicalization. Attributive genitives can both precede and follow adjectives. Nominal genitives, on the other hand, do not precede adjectives except for the cases that result in a meaning shift or ungrammaticality of noun phrases. They emphasize a peculiar characteristic of Persian Ezafe constructions, but they are not successful in providing a proper explanation of it. In this article, we attempt to provide a brief account of their position, show some mistakes in their syntactic arguments, and criticize the difference between attributive genitives and compound nouns.