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, and the referential status of the NP. Here we focus on Subject Gen Neg sentences, which on our account (following Babby and many Russian scholars) are normally Existential sentences. We address the problem raised by certain Gen Neg sentences with the copula byt' and referential subjects which appear to be negations of Locative rather than Existential sentences. We review why Babby exempted some sentences with byt' from his analysis, and present challenges raised by the two present tense forms of the verb. These problems lead to a re-examination of the distinction between Existential and Locative sentences, and of the distinction between sentential and constituent negation. We identify three distinct approaches to these issues, exploring their strengths and weaknesses. We do not argue conclusively for one approach but identify open questions which we believe need answers before the issues can be resolved.