Abstract In this paper we describe a peculiar pattern of case alternation from the polysynthetic Circassian (West Caucasian) languages, where specificity-driven differential marking of noun phrases is attested in all syntactic positions and with the absolutive and the oblique cases alike. We call this phenomenon differential nominal marking (DNM). We show that the presenсe resp. absenсe of overt case marking in Circassian fits in the two-level (DP vs. NP) structural model for nominal constructions and is in some ways similar to the phenomenon of pseudo-incorporation described for various languages with differential object marking. For instance, unmarked nominals in Circassian show number-neutrality and scope inertness with respect to negation and quantifiers. However, DNM in Circassian crucially differs from all known instances of pseudo-incorporation or case alternation in that it is not restricted to any particular syntactic position. We argue that this feature of the Circassian DNM calls all the existing approaches (both functionalist and generative) to the phenomenon of differential case marking in question.

Adyghe, a polysynthetic language of the West Caucasian family, shows the typological characteristics of ergativity, left-branching word order, and the flexibility of the lexical categories. Its word has a high degree of morphological complexity and consists of five ordered morphological zones, within which the order of affixes can vary, and recursion is possible. The information encoded in the predicate includes the argument structure, causation, and various aspectual and modal characteristics. Many meanings can be expressed, either with a combination of morphemes, or a combination of words, or with both simultaneously. There are structural asymmetries at the clause level and the principle C violations in cross-clausal syntax—the phenomenon that has been recorded also in many polysynthetic languages of America.

Our goal is to capture what the different instances of Gen/Nom and Gen/Acc have in common semantically while still respecting the multiplicity of factors involved and not predicting more uniformity than is actually found. Our main idea is to treat Gen Neg and Gen Int as a “diathesis shift”, a “demotion” into a noncanonical subject or object position, semantically of type (e,t), thereby accounting for “decreased individuation/ referentiality”.

Genitive-nominative and genitive-accusative alternations exist to various degrees in Slavic and Baltic languages. In Russian the alternation of Gen-Nom and Gen-Acc in negative sentences is conditioned by a combination of syntactic, semantic, and morphological factors. A series of papers by Borschev and Partee and by the present set of authors has studied the semantic factors involved in the genitive of negation. Our recent work builds on the intuition that genitive NPs are "less referential" than their nominative or accusative counterparts; both we and Olga Kagan take that decreased referentiality to involve a "demotion". We have formalized this demotion in terms of semantic types, arguing that Gen NPs in these alternations are of property type rather than entity type e. In this article we address how verb meanings shift along with the types of their arguments. We review the treatment of Borschev and Partee (1998) of the "bleaching" of the open class of intransitive verbs that appear in existential sentences with Subject Gen Neg, and compare it to the more heterogeneous class of shifts in verb meaning that occurs with Object Gen Neg. The resulting analysis helps to explain both the similarities and the differences between Subject Gen Neg and Object Gen Neg.

1 This question was first discussed by Arutjunova (1976, p.214), who observed that a yes-no locative question like Kolja v Londone? ‘Is Kolja in London?’ (our substitution for her similar example) admits two alternative forms for a negative answer, (1-NE), whose form corresponds to that of the affirmative (1), and (1-NET), whose form is like that of an existential sentence. She notes that (1-NET) is more widely used, and that it is (1-NET) which expresses general sentential negation. Our conclusions largely agree with hers. 2 The question arises for all examples with definite subject, “null copula”, and a locative or locative-possessive predicate, including also those in (i) and (ii).