The Genitive of Negation in Contemporary Russian

Existential Sentences, Be, and the Genitive of Negation in Russian

The Genitive of Negation (Gen Neg) in Russian involves alternation of Genitive with Nominative or Accusative under conditions which have been debated for many decades. What gives the construction its name is that Gen Neg occurs only under sentential negation; other allegedly crucial factors include topic-focus structure, unaccusativity, perspectival structure, the lexical semantics of the verb,...

The Genitive of Negation in Russian: Blocking of Case-licensing by Negation

Genitive of Negation in Russian: Blocking of Case-licensing by Negation

Genitive of negation (GN) in Russian is a phenomenon in which an argument that bears structural Case in an affirmative sentence can surface bearing Genitive Case (GEN) in the corresponding negative sentence, as shown in (1). GN occurs only on Theme arguments, as shown in (2-4), and GN marked DPs refer to non-presupposed entities, whereas their structural Case-marked counterparts refer to presup...

The Russian Genitive of Negation: Theme-Rheme Structure or Perspective Structure?

In recent work we have come to challenge assumptions that we shared (Borschev and Partee 1998a) with Babby (1980) concerning the role of Theme-Rheme structure in accounting for the nominative-genitive alternation in negated existential sentences (the NES construction, in the terms of Babby (1980), the classic work which we are building on). The challenge is exemplified most clearly in our “kefi...

Pros and Cons of a Type-Shifting Approach to Russian Genitive of Negation

In our work on the Russian Genitive of Negation (Borschev and Partee 1998a, 1998b, 2002a, 2002b, 2002c, Partee and Borschev 2002, 2004b, In press), we address the semantics of the Genitive of Negation construction and the interplay of lexical, compositional, and contextual factors. In this paper we focus on one interesting semantic proposal that has arisen recently (Kagan 2005, Partee and Borsc...