Pros and Cons of a Type-Shifting Approach to Russian Genitive of Negation
نویسندگان
چکیده
In our work on the Russian Genitive of Negation (Borschev and Partee 1998a, 1998b, 2002a, 2002b, 2002c, Partee and Borschev 2002, 2004b, In press), we address the semantics of the Genitive of Negation construction and the interplay of lexical, compositional, and contextual factors. In this paper we focus on one interesting semantic proposal that has arisen recently (Kagan 2005, Partee and Borschev 2004b) and arguments both in favor of it and against it. We consider the matter unresolved and worth continued investigation. In this introductory section we review the basic facts of the Genitive of Negation, and some of the key points of existing proposals including our own. In Section 2 we discuss our notion of “Perspective Structure” and the question of where it belongs in the grammar, concluding that it is probably best viewed as a semantic correlate of diathesis shift. In Section 3 we address the principal issue of this paper, the possibility that the relevant diathesis shift in this case involves the demotion of the Genitive-marked NP from a normal referential type e to a property type, , raising arguments both for and against such a proposal and pointing to further research which will need to be done. In many languages, existential sentences have a special syntactic shape, different from regular subject-predicate sentences. But in Russian, with its “freedom” of word order and lack of articles, the difference between existential and “plain” sentences is less obvious in many cases.
منابع مشابه
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,...
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