Three Kinds of Event Nominal Negation in Russian

摘要

This paper is about Russian event nominals, their negation and their meaning under negation. The paper shows that there are three ways to (semantically) combine negative marker with an event nominal, depending on the meaning of the nominal itself and requirements of the context. The main factors driving these differences can be shown to be of an aspectual nature; both aspectual characteristics of the initial nominal and the (contextually-driven) properties of the resulting nominal are important. As for the range of possibilities, one can find negated stative nominals derived from positive stative nominals, negated stative nominals derived from non-stative telic nominals, and negated non-stative telic nominals derived from non-stative telic nominals. These three types of negated nominals differ not only aspectually, but also with respect to where the negation is attached and how the denotation of the whole nominal is evaluated.