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International Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language, and Computation

TbiLLC 2005: Logic, Language, and Computation pp 166–188Cite as

Pros and Cons of a Type-Shifting Approach to Russian Genitive of Negation

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 4363))

Abstract

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, <e,t>, raising arguments both for and against such a proposal and pointing to further research which will need to be done.

We are grateful for valuable discussions and comments to our colleagues Elena Paducheva, Ekaterina Rakhilina, Yakov Testelets, and Igor Yanovich, to audiences at MIT, in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tbilisi, Prague, Batumi, at SALT 14 and TAG+ 7, to Partee’s 2003 semantics class at the Russian State University for the Humanities (RGGU), and to Olga Kagan. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS-9905748 to both authors for the collaborative project “Integration of Lexical & Compositional Semantics: Genitives in English and Russian”, 1999-2003, and Grant No. BCS-0418311 for the project, “The Russian Genitive of Negation: Integration of Lexical and Compositional Semantics”, 2004-07.

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  1. Barbara H. Partee
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  2. Vladimir Borschev
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Balder D. ten Cate Henk W. Zeevat

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Partee, B.H., Borschev, V. (2007). Pros and Cons of a Type-Shifting Approach to Russian Genitive of Negation. In: ten Cate, B.D., Zeevat, H.W. (eds) Logic, Language, and Computation. TbiLLC 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4363. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75144-1_13

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