We present three case studies of the distribution of adjective + head noun (‘adjective’) vs. head noun + noun-genitive (‘genitive’) constructions based on datasets extracted from the Russian National Corpus. Each case study focuses on a different set of non-head referents: case study 1 examines non-heads that are country names (like ‘Norway’ as in norvežskij N vs. N Norvegii), case study 2 looks at non-heads that refer to leaders (like ‘president’ as in prezidentskij N vs. N prezidenta), and the focus of case study 3 is non-heads that are person names (like ‘Petja’ as in Petina N vs. N Peti). Head nouns in all three datasets were annotated for the same set of nine semantic categories representing an Individuation Hierarchy. This hierarchy accounts for only some of the patterns that we see across the case studies. Other patterns can be explained in terms of: ‘uniqueness’, which favors the genitive construction when the head noun is a unique entity; ‘salience’, which favors the genitive construction when the non-head is more salient than the head noun; and ‘obligatoriness’, which favors the genitive construction when the head is a relational noun that presupposes a specific non-head.