Genesis of the Genitive of Negation in Balto-Slavic and Its Evidence in Contemporary Slovenian

Abstract

Genitive of negation is a Balto-Slavic syntactic rule that governs the transformation of accusative complements of transitive verbs or subjects of existential constructions in positive sentences to genitive complements in negative sentences. At present, this change is mandatory in Slovenian, Polish, and Lithuanian. In Russian, it is optional, while in other Slavic languages and Latvian, it is either considered archaic or extinct. The origin of the genitive of negation is usually derived from the ablative or partitive genitive case. The article advocates the latter and presents a model that derives the Balto-Slavic genitive of negation from the partitive genitive, which at a certain point acquired an emphatic meaning. According to the results of our empirical research, the original emphatic markedness of the genitive of negation is genetically and/or typologically reflected in contemporary colloquial Slovenian.