Genitive alternation in Russian: a situation semantics approach.

Ljudmila Geist

Abstract:

In this paper I have evaluated the semantic account of the Genitive Alternation suggested by Kagan (2013) and going back to Partee & Borschev’s work that assumes a correlation between two properties of Gen objects: (i) they lack existential commitment; (ii) they denote properties.
I have shown that the second part of this proposal, namely the Property-Type Hypothesis, cannot capture the referential properties of inherently referential Gen objects such as proper names. I have suggested an alternative analysis of the Acc/Gen alternation in the framework of situation semantics. In situation semantics NPs are evaluated with respect to situations as parts of the world. In such a framework, it is natural to assume that reference is restricted toindividuals that can be found within a particular situation introduced by the determiner of the noun phrase.
I suggest that the interpretational differences between Acc and Gen under negation lie in the event dependency or event independency of the respective NP. I propose that under negation, Acc NPs are related to the free situation variable introduced by their determiner, thus they are event independent. By contrast, Gen NPs are related to the bound situation variable associated with the event argument introduced by the main predicate. Thus, they are evaluated relative to the event and hence are event dependent. All in all, the Gen/Acc case indicates whether the denotation of the NP is fixed on the verb-eventive or the discourse-situational level. Syntactically, the case marker determines where the binding operator for the situation variable will be inserted, below the negation or above it.