Accusative/Genitive Under Negation in Russian : From Syntactic Marking to Semantics

This study investigates the reasons for choosing the genitive or accusative case for propositional nouns with verbs in negative sentences. The probable reason for the recommendation in grammars to choose the genitive case with abstract nouns in negative construction is two constructions overlapping: the negative construction and the construction of descriptive predicate. The study examines 22 examples taken from the National Corpus of the Russian Language 2000-2017 with the propositional abstract object otvet (answer). The examples are divided into two groups – with the object included in the construction of the descriptive predicate and with the verb naming one proposition, and two-subject-constructions. The examples of both groups mostly contain genitive nouns, but for different reasons