Vladimir Borschev

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, and the referential status of the NP. Here we focus on Subject Gen Neg sentences, which on our account (following Babby and many Russian scholars) are normally Existential sentences. We address the problem raised by certain Gen Neg sentences with the copula byt’ and referential subjects which appear to be negations of Locative rather than Existential sentences. We review why Babby exempted some sentences with byt’ from his analysis, and present challenges raised by the two present tense forms of the verb. These problems lead to a re-examination of the distinction between Existential and Locative sentences, and of the distinction between sentential and constituent negation. We identify three distinct approaches to these issues, exploring their strengths and weaknesses. We do not argue conclusively for one approach but identify open questions which we believe need answers before the issues can be resolved.

Genitive Modifiers, Sorts, and Metonymy

Our long-term goal is to contribute to the integration of formal and lexical semantics. Our more immediate theoretical starting point is the idea of text as theory, within a model-theoretic semantic framework. We describe a set of empirical problems in the domain of genitive modifiers that offers a challenge to theories of the integration of lexical, compositional, and contextual information. After sketching a solution, we raise the issue of metonymy in the interpretation of genitives, and examine the role of sortal information in the specification of underspecified meanings and in processes of type-shifting and sort-shifting, including metonymy.

Russian Genitive of Negation Alternations: The Role of Verb Semantics

Genitive-nominative and genitive-accusative alternations exist to various degrees in Slavic and Baltic languages. In Russian the alternation of Gen-Nom and Gen-Acc in negative sentences is conditioned by a combination of syntactic, semantic, and morphological factors. A series of papers by Borschev and Partee and by the present set of authors has studied the semantic factors involved in the genitive of negation. Our recent work builds on the intuition that genitive NPs are “less referential” than their nominative or accusative counterparts; both we and Olga Kagan take that decreased referentiality to involve a “demotion”. We have formalized this demotion in terms of semantic types, arguing that Gen NPs in these alternations are of property type rather than entity type e. In this article we address how verb meanings shift along with the types of their arguments. We review the treatment of Borschev and Partee (1998) of the “bleaching” of the open class of intransitive verbs that appear in existential sentences with Subject Gen Neg, and compare it to the more heterogeneous class of shifts in verb meaning that occurs with Object Gen Neg. The resulting analysis helps to explain both the similarities and the differences between Subject Gen Neg and Object Gen Neg.