Declino della cooccorrenza di genitivo e accusativo nell’espressione dell’oggetto diretto in russo

This work considers the phenomena of genitive/accusative alternation in the case of the object in russian and proposes a unified analysis of the three different uses of postverbal genitive: genitive of negation, genitive partitive, and intensional genitive. The paper originates from the semantic oppositions traditionally associated with the genitive/accusative alternation: - indeterminacy vs determinacy of the object (ja ne poluČal pisem / ja ne poluČal pis'ma; on prosit deneg / on prosit den'gi) - non existence vs existence of the object (ja ne vižu maŠin / ja ne vižu maŠiny) - indefinitness vs definitness of the object (on dobavil saxaru / on dobavil saxar) and shows, through the results of an empirical study, that the interaction of the different factors that influence the selection of the genitive case (i.e. intensional verbs, negation, partitivity) can obscure the semantic interpretation of the object.