The Russian Genitive of Negation: Integration of Lexical and Compositional Semantics Project Description 1. Integration of Lexical and Compositional Semantics 1.1. Background and Long-term Goals

1.1. Background and Long-term Goals. The present project has three goals: (i) the integration of lexical and compositional semantics, a longterm goal; (ii) a better understanding of the semantics of the Russian Genitive of Negation (Gen Neg), a construction which offers intriguing challenges for the first goal; and (iii) the integration of Russian lexical semantics with Western formal semantics, a “broader-impact goal”, important in its own right, and in our view, a particularly promising way to approach the first two goals. Background for our goals and broader impact are described in Section 1. The Gen Neg construction, its problems, prior work, and our hypotheses are described in Sections 2-4. The plan of work is in Section 5. In Section 6 we describe our earlier project on Possessive constructions, which addressed the same long-range goals through a different family of constructions. Lexical semantics has a long history in many traditions. Compositional semantics, particularly in the guise of formal semantics, is a younger field but has undergone rapid development and diversification since the seminal Montague (1973). The task of integrating these two fields is essential for a comprehensive view of semantics and its relation to lexicon and syntax; but such integrative work is in its infancy. There is exciting new work and recognition of the need, and such work may soon coalesce into a “field”. Our project will draw on recent relevant work in several frameworks; we believe it will be extremely valuable to draw Russian lexical semantics into this mix. Formal semantics has benefited from increased attention to “sublexical structure” and to finer-grained model structures, especially in the entity and event domains (Bach 1986, Kratzer 1994, Krifka 1992, Landman 2000, Link 1983). Type-driven interpretation and coerced type shifts and meaning shifts provide part of the account of how lexical meaning both influences and is influenced by the meanings of constructions (Bittner 2001, Borschev and Partee 2001a, Partee 1986, Pustejovsky 1995). Other relevant foundational work, in approaches better known in Russia than formal semantics, includes (Goldberg 1995, Jackendoff 1996, Lakoff 1977, Talmy 2000). Building on such pioneering work as (Apresjan 1974, Bierwisch 1983, Dowty 1979), recent work in several frameworks advances the integration of lexical and compositional meaning (Ackerman and Moore 2001, Bierwisch and Schreuder 1992, Boguslavskij 1996, Dölling 1992, Dowty 1991, Kamp and Rossdeutscher 1994, Kiparsky 1997, Krifka 2000, Levin 1993, Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1996, Padučeva 1997a, Padučeva in press-a, Padučeva in press-b, Rappaport Hovav and Levin 1998, Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2002, Wunderlich 1997). Working together with our Russian colleagues and in dialogue with this wider community, we believe we can make distinctive foundational contributions to an important new field of research.