Genetiuus and Ablatiuus pretii in Latin: concepts, functions, and formal marks

This paper deals with the revision of the Genitive and the Ablative as codes for the expressions of value and price. In the first part (Sections 2 and 3), the paper revisits the problem of the productivity and partial interchangeability of the two markers and concludes that both are productive, each one for one role: the Genitive is the only way of codifying intrinsic value (understood as an intrinsic property of entities), whereas the Ablative only codifies market value. Market value is projected as estimated value in some contexts, and as price, in other contexts. The second part of the paper (Section 4) deals with the syntactic position they take in their verbal contexts and concludes that the fact that the valuing expression is in the complement, not in the verbs, is an important factor in explaining the association of the Genitive to intrinsic value and the Ablative to market value (projected in some contexts as price).