Abstract
Chapter 7investigates the ways in which the choice of case is affected by aspect and number. Irrealis Genitive tends to be assigned to plural nominals, rather than to singular ones, and to complements of imperfective, rather than perfective, verbs. It will be shown that under negation, singular objects as well as objects of perfective verbs exhibit a tendency to carry existential commitment, a factor that rules out Irrealis Genitive. I argue that this tendency is derived from the semantically marked status of perfective aspect and singular morphology, compared to the default imperfective and plural forms.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
This factor is contributed by perfective aspect, normally associated with telicity and, thus, with an event reaching its natural endpoint (e.g. Krifka 1992; Filip 1999, 2000, 2008). In the case of reading an article, the natural endpoint comes when the whole article is finished. Since in the discussed example, the object is plural, Dima is expected to finish reading a number of contextually presupposed articles.
- 3.
It should be noted that (17a) does not require any of the scenarios mentioned above. Thus, it is acceptable even if the speaker has not expected Dima to find any documents and does not know of any search conducted by Dima. The sentence can be merely used to assert that it is not true that Dima has, by accident, come across any documents. Such an interpretation is not available for (17b). This sentence seems to presuppose either that Dima has been engaged in a search, or that the speaker has expected Dima to find some documents – whether by chance or as a result of looking for them.
- 4.
An exception might be constituted by verbs of creation, in such sentences as He didn’t write a letter. However, even in these sentences, once it is assumed that an accomplishment event did take place but was not completed, one tends to conclude that the created object did come into existence, even though the creation process was not finished. Thus, if we hear that John didn’t finish writing a letter, we may conclude that a letter does exist, even though it is not completed. This, in turn, would mean that the object has a referent in the actual world, and is likely to be interpreted as an entity in that world, rather than a property. This approach is controversial, however. Thus, Parsons (1990) treats such NPs as a letterin the sentence above as denoting objects. In contrast, Landman (1992) does not accept this view.
- 5.
Perfective aspect is compatible here with genitive case-marking. Perfectivity does not force a specific or presupposed reading of the nominal. The knowledge that the speaker was present in the room in question is sufficient to trigger an expectation that a seeing event would take place, i.e. that the speaker would see those objects that were present in the room, within her field of perception. Apparently, the presence of an expectation of this kind is sufficient to license perfective aspect. The object therefore need not receive a presupposed existence reading. In addition, existence of flowers in the room could be expected by some other discourse participant but not by the speaker. The speaker could then use the genitive form in order to emphasize that an expectation or commitment of this kind is groundless.
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Kagan, O. (2013). The Interaction of Case with Aspect and Number. In: Semantics of Genitive Objects in Russian. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 89. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5225-2_7
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