Pros and Cons of a Type-Shifting Approach to Russian Genitive of Negation (original) (raw)

Genitive of negation and scope of negation in Russian existential sentences

Annual Workshop on Formal Approaches to …, 2002

Introduction As noted by Brown (1999), there is general agreement in the literature on Russian" genitive of negation"(GenNeg) that GenNeg occurs only when the NP in question is within the scope of sentential negation (NEG). The apparent optionality of GenNeg within the scope of negation is a point of difficulty, with authors divided about whether the choice between Genitive and Nominative or Accusative in such cases is accompanied by some difference in syntactic structure and/or in semantics or pragmatics. ...

Lecture 11: The Russian Genitive of Negation, Existential Sentences, and Diathesis Alternation: Interaction of Lexical and Compositional Semantics

people.umass.edu

In many languages, existential sentences have a special syntactic shape, different from regular subject-predicate sentences. This has traditionally been thought of as a distinct construction, rather than an instance of verbal diathesis, although there have long been approaches which have suggested that either of two arguments of be might become the subject, or subject-like (Chvany 1975, Moro 1997). In Russian, with its “freedom” of word order and lack of articles, the difference between existential and “plain” sentences is not ...

Existential sentences, BE, and the genitive of negation in Russian

Existence: Semantics and syntax, 2007

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 ...

The Russian Genitive of Negation, Existential Sentences, and Diathesis Alternation: Interaction of Lexical and Compositional Semantics

In many languages, existential sentences have a special syntactic shape, different from regular subject-predicate sentences. This has traditionally been thought of as a distinct construction, rather than an instance of verbal diathesis, although there have long been approaches which have suggested that either of two arguments of be might become the subject, or subject-like (Chvany 1975, Moro 1997). In Russian, with its “freedom” of word order and lack of articles, the difference between existential and “plain” sentences is not ...

Formal and Lexical Semantics and the Genitive In Negated Existential Sentences In Russian

1997

Goals 1.1 Theoretical concerns and general goals The theoretical concern of this paper is the integration of formal and lexical semantics, more specifically the traditions of (post-) Montague Grammar and the Moscow semantic school, respectively. We propose to represent lexical meaning in the form of meaning postulates, and the output of compositional semantic interpretation in a formula of intensional logic in which lexical items are primitives, and to integrate lexical and compositional information via entailments from these (and other) sources. We think of the content of a text as a theory determined by a set of axioms together with their entailments. The axioms come from various sources: lexicon, compositional semantics, context and background knowledge. (Broader and narrower notions of semantic or semantico-pragmatic interpretation correspond to the inclusion or exclusion of various potential sources of axioms.) Such a theory characterizes the class of all models that are consistent with the content of the given text, or of the text together with aspects of its context. Some of the most general axioms, which may be taken to form part of the theory of any text, are those that represent some of the most general constraints on possible models of a given language, axioms which contribute to what the Moscow School calls naivnaja kartina mira 'the naive picture of the world' (Apresjan 1974), and what formal semanticists, following Bach (1986), call Natural Language Metaphysics. We do not pretend to have an articulated view of the nature of all the different sorts of axioms that may play a role in the "theory" of a text, but here we will illustrate some of the possibilities.

Information structure, Perspectival Structure, diathesis alternation, and the Russian Genitive of Negation

Proceedings of Ninth Symposium on Logic and Language (LoLa 9), Besenyőtelek, Hungary, August 24–26, 2006

The Russian Genitive of Negation construction (Gen Neg) involves case alternation between Genitive and the two structural cases, Nominative and Accusative. 1 The factors governing the alternation have been a matter of debate for many decades, and there is a huge literature. Here we focus on one central issue and its theoretical ramifications. The theoretical issue is the following. The same truth-conditional content can often be structured in more than one way; we believe that there is a distinction between choices in how to ...