Genitive With Adjectives and Adverbs

Adjectives, like verbs, can take a complement: full *of water, guilty **of murder, worthy **of attention. In Ancient Greek a great many adjectives governed the genitive for this. Modern Greek has kept the pattern only in patches — the rest has migrated to the *accusative or to a preposition, chiefly για and από. That makes this topic less a matter of rule than of register: the genitive complement is alive in legal, journalistic and literary Greek, and largely gone from the kitchen. This page separates the two, because using the wrong one does not produce ungrammatical Greek so much as Greek that sounds like a court transcript.

γεμάτος: three constructions, one meaning

Γεμάτος ("full") is the clearest case study, because all three possibilities are attested and each carries a different flavour.

Read those three in order and you can hear the register climb. The genitive is not archaic here — a novelist writes it without irony — but it is marked, and a learner who reaches for it by default will sound as though everything they say is being narrated.

Adjectives that genuinely still take the genitive

These are the ones worth knowing, and almost all of them belong to a specific professional register.

Several of these live mainly inside fixed collocations rather than as free constructions, and that is how to learn them:

• άξιος λόγου — worth mentioning ("τίποτα άξιο λόγου" = nothing worth mentioning)
• άξιος θαυμασμού — admirable
• άξιος συγχαρητηρίων — deserving congratulations
• κύριος της κατάστασης — in control of the situation
• αντάξιος του ονόματός του — worthy of his name

The adjectives that look like they should — and don't

This is where the transfer errors come from, because English uses of for all of them. In Modern Greek these take a preposition + accusative — almost always για, occasionally με — and never the genitive:

English jealous of has no adjective phrase to match it at all, and this is worth flagging because the obvious candidate misleads. Ζηλιάρης is dispositional — it describes a personality, not a relation, so it takes no complement: Είναι πολύ ζηλιάρης ("he's the jealous type"). To say you are jealous of someone, Greek switches to the verb ζηλεύω with a plain accusative.

Note that even ένοχος, the flagship genitive adjective, takes για the moment you leave the courtroom: Νιώθω ένοχος *για ό,τι έγινε* ("I feel guilty about what happened"). The genitive belongs to the verdict, not to the feeling.

Comparatives take a genitive clitic

Here is the one place in this whole area that is thoroughly colloquial. Greek normally builds comparison with από + accusative (μεγαλύτερος από εμένα), but when the standard of comparison is a pronoun, everyday speech attaches a weak genitive clitic straight onto the comparative.

Both forms carry a second accent — μεγαλύτερός μου, ψηλότερή σου — for the usual reason: the clitic pushes the stress out of the last-three-syllables window. The wider picture is on Case after comparatives.

Adverbs that govern the genitive

Two quite different families here, at opposite ends of the register scale.

1. Everyday locational adverbs with a clitic. Μπροστά, πίσω, δίπλα, κοντά, μακριά, γύρω, απέναντι, ανάμεσα, μαζί all take a weak genitive pronoun — and this is ordinary spoken Greek, used constantly.

Watch the switch in the right-hand column: with a full noun these adverbs drop the genitive entirely and use σε or από + accusative. There is no ×μπροστά του σπιτιού. Note also the compulsory second accent on απέναντί μου and ανάμεσά μας, where the adverb is stressed on its third-from-last syllable.

2. Official quantifying adverbs. Άνω, κάτω, πέραν, πλησίον + genitive belong to signs, contracts and regulations. Every one has a plain spoken equivalent with πάνω από / κάτω από.

The pairing is exact and worth internalising as a register switch: άνω/κάτω των + genitive on the notice board, πάνω/κάτω από + accusative in your mouth. Related formal connectors are collected on Formal connectors.

Common Mistakes

1. Making γεμάτος take the genitive by default. It is not wrong, but it is a register mismatch in speech.

2. Using the genitive after σίγουρος, ικανός, περήφανος. These never governed the genitive in the modern language; the complement goes in για + accusative.

3. Leaving out the article in a genitive complement that needs one. Κατώτερος προσδοκιών is not a phrase; the set is definite.

4. Attaching a genitive noun to a locational adverb. The clitic is fine; a full noun is not.

5. Forgetting the second accent on a comparative with a clitic. It is compulsory in writing.

Key Takeaways

• Adjective complements in the genitive are a register phenomenon, not a live productive rule. Legal, journalistic, academic and literary Greek keep them; conversation has moved to για / από / με + accusative.
• γεμάτος takes the accusative by default (γεμάτο κόσμο), often από (γεμάτος από σύννεφα), and the genitive only in elevated writing (γεμάτο τρυφερότητας).
• Genuinely genitive-governing adjectives: άξιος, ανάξιος, αντάξιος, ένοχος, αίτιος, κύριος, επικεφαλής, ανώτερος/κατώτερος, πλήρης, μεστός — mostly inside fixed collocations like άξιος λόγου and κύριος της κατάστασης.
• υπεύθυνος, ικανός, σίγουρος, περήφανος take για + accusative, never the genitive, despite English of — with one carve-out: υπεύθυνος used as a noun does take a genitive (ο υπεύθυνος του τμήματος, "the head of the department").
• "Jealous of" is not an adjective phrase in Greek: ζηλιάρης is dispositional and complementless, so use the verb ζηλεύω + accusative.
• Comparatives take a weak genitive clitic in ordinary speech — μεγαλύτερός μου, ψηλότερή σου — with a compulsory second accent.
• Locational adverbs (μπροστά, δίπλα, κοντά, μαζί, απέναντι) take a genitive clitic but σε/από + accusative with a full noun.
• Άνω / κάτω / πέραν / πλησίον + genitive is official register; the spoken equivalents are πάνω από / κάτω από / κοντά σε + accusative.