🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2720022@otter.hpl.hp.com> sjmz@otter.hpl.hp.com (Stefek Zaba) writes:
[various things]

Your interesting remarks about Polish once again points to the fact that
something is "missing" in the Russian construction, that is, a modal
like the Polish reflexive constructions you cite that take a dative
argument.

Incidentally, I have always wished for someone to investigate the use of
genitive/partitive in the languages of the Baltic region with negation and
displaced quantifiers. Superficially, they look quite similar, e.g.
w.r.t. the genitive with negation, but when you scratch the surface
slightly, there appear to be real differences.  For example, if I
understand the facts correctly, Polish *requires* the genitive object
with all negated verbs, as Finnish does the so-called "partitive" (by
the way, why in English-language Finnish grammars is there a case
spelled "genetive"?).  In Russian, by contrast (and, I think, in
Lithuanian -- I once read something by Alan Timberlake on the subject),
the genitive is seemingly reserved for objects that lie in the scope of
negation.  Interesting work to be done sorting out the spectrum of
variation, and asking whether these are really the same phenomena, or
syntactic "faux amis", as it were.

-David Pesetsky