Long Distan e Genitive of Negation in Polish

The aim of this article is to provide a formal analysis of non-local Genitive of Negation in Polish, a phenomenon occurring in so-called ‘clause union’ environments and consisting in the genitive case being assigned to an object of a lower verb when a higher verb is negated, instead of the expected accusative. In particular, I examine two aspects of such non-local Genitive of Negation, occasionally noted in the traditional literature, but ignored in formal or generative linguistics, namely, its optionality and its potential multiplicity. I show that the main characteristics of non-local Genitive of Negation follow in a straightforward manner from the interaction of two independently motivated analyses, namely, an analysis of ‘clause union’ environments as involving optional raising, and a local non-configurational analysis of syntactic case assignment. Both analyses are couched within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. I argue that the resulting account is superior to previous analyses of non-local Genitive of Negation in Polish on empirical, formal and conceptual grounds. 0. Introdu tion Just as case assignment is one of the most conspicuous features of many Slavic languages, including Polish, the so-called Genitive of Negation (GoN) is one of the most widely discussed phenomena in Slavic linguistics. Somewhat surprisingly, though, there are aspects of the Genitive of Negation that have not been successfully analyzed, or even noticed, so far. This article is devoted to one such aspect, namely, to the ‘nonlocal’ Genitive of Negation, henceforth referred to as Long Distance Genitive of Negation (LD GoN), and, especially, to its optionality and potential multiplicity. Section 1 briefly recalls the well known facts about the (Long Distance) Genitive of Negation in Polish, while section 2 introduces twomuch less known aspects of LDGoN, namely, its optionality and potential multiplicity. Section 3 presents a formal analysis of Polish LD GoN; although the basic intuitions behind the analysis are formalizable within many contemporary syntactic theories, the analysis presented here is formulated within the Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG; Pollard and Sag 1994), This paper was presented at the first Generative Linguistics in Poland workshop, Warsaw, 13–14 November 1999, at the Institute of Polish, University of Warsaw, 17 November 1999, at the third European Conference on the Formal Description of Slavic Languages, Leipzig, 1–3 December 1999, and at the Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, 9 May 2000. I am grateful to the respective audiences and, especially, to Ash Asudeh, Piotr Bański, Bob Borsley, Ivan Sag, Ewa Willim, and anonymous reviewers for their comments.