Department
of Linguistics – University of Massachusetts/Amherst
and
VINITI –
“The Semantics of Russian
Genitive of Negation: the Nature and Role of Perspectival Structure”
There is a large
literature on the problem of the "genitive of negation" in Russian, a
construction that poses challenges for syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, as
well as for the nature of the lexicon. The problem is
illustrated in (1) and (2), two different ways to say “[the/an] answer hasn’t
arrived”. Example (2) shows the genitive of negation: the subject is in the
genitive case and the verb is in a non-agreeing impersonal form.
(1) Otvet iz polka
ne prišel.
Answer-nom.m.sg from regiment NEG arrived-m.sg
‘The
answer from the regiment has not arrived.’
(2)
Otveta iz polka ne
prišlo.
Answer-gen.m.sg from regiment NEG
arrived-n.sg
‘There
was no answer from the regiment.’
What the alternation between nominative and genitive
in such sentences depends on is an old and difficult problem. Almost all
Western investigators believe that sentences like (1) and (2) always differ in
scope of negation. Babby (1980) proposed that topic-focus structure determines
scope of negation, and hence is crucial for genitive of negation. Pesetsky
(1982) argued that the Genitive NP is always an underlying direct object
bearing a null negative polarity quantifier, and that the relevant intransitive
verbs are always “unaccusative” (their surface subject is an underlying
object). Russian work on the Genitive of Negation (Apresjan, Paducheva, and
others) emphasizes the lexical semantics of the relevant verbs and the
referential status of the subject.
In our work (Borschev and Partee 2002a,b, Partee and Borschev 2002) we are trying to understand
the semantics of the construction in a way that integrates lexical and
compositional semantics, but we do not believe that scope of negation is the
whole semantic story. And by no means all unaccusative verbs participate in the
construction, which seems to be limited in the intransitive case to
“existential sentences” and modifications thereof; so some of the puzzles are
related to cross-linguistic puzzles about the differences between “existential
sentences” and “ordinary” sentences. We consider interactions of syntax and
semantics of the (open class of) “genitive” verbs, referential status and
presuppositionality of the subject, and other factors. In particular, we argue
for a difference in “perspectival structure” regarding the relative roles of
subject and implicit or explicit Locative, a difference similar to the subtle
semantic distinction associated with diathesis alternation in spray/load
verbs, discussed in recent work by Levin and Rappaport Hovav, Krifka, and
others.
Some
of our work so far on this topic can be found at http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~partee/.
References
Apresjan,
Juri D. 1980. Tipy informacii dlja poverxnostno-semantičeskogo komponenta
modeli "Smysl Ű Tekst" Vienna/Moscow: Wiener Slavistische
Almanach/Škola "Jazyki Russkoj Kultury".
Babby,
Leonard.
1980. Existential Sentences and Negation in Russian.
Borschev,
Vladimir, and Barbara H. Partee. 2002a. The Russian genitive of negation in
existential sentences: the role of Theme-Rheme structure reconsidered. In Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague (nouvelle série),
eds. Hajičová et al, 185-250.
Borschev, Vladimir, and Barbara H. Partee. 2002b. O semantike bytijnyx predloženij (On the semantics of
existential sentences). Semiotika i Informatika 37 (
Paducheva, Elena V. 1997. Roditel'nyj sub"ekta v otricatel'nom
predloženii: sintaksis ili semantika? (Genitive of
Subject in negated sentences: syntax or semantics?) Voprosy Jazykoznanija
No.2, 101-116.
Partee,
Barbara H., and Vladimir Borschev. 2002. Genitive of negation and scope of negation in
Russian existential sentences. In Annual Workshop on Formal Approaches to
Slavic Linguistics10 (FASL 10), ed. Jindrich Toman, 181-200.
Pesetsky, David. 1982. Paths and
Categories, MIT: Ph.D. dissertation.
Faculty Host: Dr. Robert Frank (