Genitive Objects and Syntactic Categories

This paper investigates the functional structure of genitive objects in Russian. While all types of genitive objects have been claimed in the literature to denote properties, the paper argues that they differ in terms of their syntactic “size”. Thus, nominals that appear in Genitive of Negation and Intensional Genitive (unified under the term Irrealis Genitive) can be full DPs. In contrast, objects that appear in Partitive Genitive are bare NPs that lack the DP, QP/NumP and even the Div(ider)P(hrase) projections. Finally, genitive case is assigned especially productively to objects of verbs that contain certain prefixes, such as the accumulative na-. This case, referred to in the paper as Prefixational Genitive, is similar to Partitive Genitive in that it cannot be assigned to DPs and QPs/NumPs; however, unlike Partitive Genitive, it can be assigned to DivPs. Thus, Russian genitive objects can be bare NPs, DivPs and full DPs.