Description:

Linguistics Colloquium Series: Vera Gribanova

Affiliation: Stanford University

Topic: Negative concord, genitive of negation, and case (dis-)connectivity in Russian ellipsis

Abstract: 

I present an in-progress investigation of interactions between Russian polarity-sensitive items — negative concord items, and DPs marked with the genitive of negation — and clausal ellipsis operations. The crosslinguistic stability of case connectivity effects in constituent ellipsis has been one of the strongest pieces of evidence we have for syntax inside ellipsis sites (Ross 1969, Merchant 2001). Such evidence has typically been drawn from environments where no case variation is permitted independently of ellipsis: that is, here is only one correct choice of case assignments for the arguments involved. The potential of accusative or genitive case assignment under negation in Russian — that is, the availability but not obligatoriness of the genitive of negation — gives rise to the possibility that case marking could vary between an antecedent and the remnant of ellipsis, without necessarily requiring there to be other major lexical mismatches between the antecedent and elided content. I this talk, I exploit this situation with the goal of understanding of why there exist asymmetries in how case connectivity is enforced across types of Russian clausal ellipsis, and why these asymmetries take the shape that they do. The focal point of the talk is a type of TP ellipsis called contrastive polarity ellipsis (Kazenin 2006, Gribanova 2017), in which a contrastive DP is fronted to the left periphery, preceding a polar particle (‘yes’ or ‘no’). In such configurations, genitive patients under negation in the antecedent can correspond to an accusative patient remnant outside the ellipsis site, but never the reverse. To predict this asymmetry, I develop an analysis of the system of licensing relations that connects the syntax of polarity expression, negative concord, and genitive of negation, and combine this with a formulation of the identity relation in ellipsis in which head-to-head identity between the elided material and the antecedent must be invoked (Saab 2008, 2010, 2022, Tanaka 2011, Rudin 2019, Stigliano 2022).