The Russian Genitive of Negation: Integration of Lexical and Compositional Semantics

在国家科学基金会的支持下，芭芭拉·H·帕蒂博士和弗拉基米尔·博尔舍夫博士将与三名俄罗斯学者合作，对俄语语法中研究最广泛的问题之一进行为期三年的研究。“否定所有格”这一令人费解的现象涉及否定句中的所有格与主格或宾格的交替。经过几十年的研究，主要的开放问题涉及构式的语义(S)及其在主语和宾语格交替中的“可选性”的理论分析。本项目关注语法、词汇语义和成分(构式)语义之间的相互作用，以及以“否定范围”为中心的西方说法和以动词在支配不同格时的词汇语义的变化为中心的俄语说法之间的关系。俄罗斯和西方语言学家在这些问题上有不同的方法；研究人员认为，这些方法可以整合并建立在这些方法的基础上，以获得对涉及词汇和成分语义整合的结构和相关理论问题的见解。帕蒂博士和博尔舍夫博士每年将有半年时间在俄罗斯与他们的俄罗斯顾问、俄语句法和语义学领域的领导者(埃琳娜·帕杜奇娃博士、叶卡捷琳娜·拉赫利纳博士和雅科夫·特斯特莱茨博士)一起举办研究研讨会。马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校一名研究助理将帮助寻找和搜索更多语料库和数据库，以补充已发表的统计研究，并就问题领域的各个方面开展原创性研究。顾问们将帮助探索已有的和新的关于句法、语义和语用因素之间相互作用的假设(S)，包括Borschev和Partee的“透视结构”假说。该项目将加深我们对否定句的特殊性质的理解，以及在我们如何组织和图案化我们用语言描述的情况时词义、构式意义、信息结构和认知选择之间的相互作用。该项目的意义在于它将两个丰富但长期分离的语言学传统--莫斯科学派的词汇语义学和西方的模式论(形式)语义学传统结合在一起，并通过对一个重要问题的应用展示了如何有效地结合它们的优势，以在形式语义学和词汇语义学相互作用以及与句法和语境的相互作用的基本问题上取得进展。该项目的更广泛影响包括让俄罗斯和西方语言学更紧密、更好地接触，并为西方研究生和年轻的俄罗斯学者提供高级培训。

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Barbara H. Partee and Dr. Vladimir Borschev will conduct three years of research with the collaboration of three Russian scholars on one of the most extensively studied problems in the grammar of Russian. The puzzling phenomenon of "Genitive of Negation" involves the alternation of genitive with nominative or accusative case in negative sentences. After decades of progress by leading scholars, major open issues concern the semantics of the construction(s) and the theoretical analysis of its "optionality" in both subject and object case alternations.This project focuses on the interactions of grammar, lexical semantics, and compositional (constructional) semantics, and on the relation between Western accounts that center on "the scope of negation" and Russian accounts that center on shifts in the lexical semantics of the verbs when they govern different cases ("diathesis alternations"). Russian and Western linguists have had different approaches to these issues; the investigators believe that these approaches can be integrated and built upon to achieve insights into the construction and related theoretical issues involving the integration of lexical and compositional semantics. Drs. Partee and Borschev will spend half of each year in Russia conducting research seminars with their Russian consultants, leaders in the fields of Russian syntax and semantics (Drs. Elena Paducheva, Ekaterina Rakhilina, and Yakov Testelets). A Research Assistant based for most of the year at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst will help to find and search additional corpora and data bases to supplement published statistical studies, as well as carrying out original research on aspects of the problem area. The consultants will help to explore existing and new hypotheses about the interaction of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors that have been argued to play a role in the construction(s), including Borschev and Partee's hypothesized "Perspectival Structure".The project will advance our understanding of the special properties of negative sentences, and of the interactions among word meaning, constructional meaning, information structure, and cognitive choices in how we structure and schematize the situations we describe with language. The significance of the project lies in its bringing together two rich but long-separated linguistic traditions of semantic research, the Moscow school of lexical semantics and the Western tradition of model-theoretic ('formal') semantics, and showing by application to an important problem how their strengths can be effectively combined to make progress on basic issues in the interaction of formal and lexical semantics with each other and with syntax and context. The broader impacts of the project include bringing Russian and Western linguistics into closer and better contact, and providing advanced training for Western graduate students and young Russian scholars.