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 “kefir example”: (i) [Ja iskal kefir.] Kefira v magazine ne bylo. [I looked-for kefir.] Kefir-GEN-m-sg in store NEG was-n-sg ‘[I was looking for kefir.] There wasn’t any kefir in the store.’ It is an important part of the explanatory structure of Babby 1980 that in sentence (i), the Theme is v magazine and the Rheme is kefir[byl-]. Babby takes Theme-Rheme structure to be crucial for determining the scope of negation, and scope of negation to be a necessary condition in licensing the occurrence of the genitive of negation. But arguments from word order, intonation, and pragmatics have convinced us that kefira in example (i) must be considered (part of) the Theme, and not the Rheme. We * We are grateful to Eva Hajičova, Petr Sgall, Jiří Hana, and Tomáš Hoskovec for permission to take parts of this paper from Sections 1, 2, and 4 of Borschev and Partee 2002a. Fuller acknowledgements appear in that paper. In this paper our first acknowledgement is to Leonard Babby, both for inspiring this work with his foundational work on the genitive of negation in Babby 1980 and for both encouragement and critical suggestions for our work on the topic over the last several years. Thanks to Ji-yung Kim for assistance in her role as Research Assistant on the NSF grant mentioned below and her help with the formatting of this paper. This work was supported in part by a grant to the first author from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, Project No. 96-06-80315a, in part by a COBASE grant from the National Academy of Sciences in 1997 to the second author for collaboration with the first author on the project “Towards an Integration of Formal and Lexical Semantics: Meaning Postulates and Fine-grained Sortal Structures”, and in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS-9905748 to the both authors for the collaborative project “Integration of Lexical & Compositional Semantics: Genitives in English and Russian”.