Negation, Intensionality, and Aspect: Interaction with NP Semantics

In Section 2, we review (briefly and superficially) some of the basics of NP interpretations, the semantics of the relevant operator-like elements, and their interaction. Then we look at how some natural languages encode certain relations between NPs and certain operators, giving us a window on some aspects of the “logic of natural language”. There we find a puzzle in the Russian “genitive of negation” construction, which seems to lump negation and some intensional verbs together (Section 3); this puzzle forms the empirical core of the paper. In Section 4 we work our way through some hypotheses about what is going on, concentrating on the interactions among scope, NP interpretation, and the semantic properties of negation and intensional operators. Section 5 adds aspect to the picture, drawing especially on recent works by Paul Kiparsky and by Dmitry Levinson. In Section 5.1 I discuss Kiparsky’s study (Kiparsky 1998) of parallels between partitive case in Finnish and imperfective aspect in Russian, and explore the possibility that Finnish partitive, Russian imperfective, and Russian Genitive have semantic similarities that may be described in terms of ‘decreased referentiality’. In Section 5.2 I adapt some arguments from Dmitry Levinson’s work on a slightly different kind of parallel between imperfectivity and genitive case under negation, to further support the idea of similarity between NPI contexts and intensional contexts. In the concluding section I opt for a view of “family resemblance” properties that many but not all instances of negation and intensionality share, so as to allow for equally important differences that show up among the family members (Section 6).