Participants

Investigators                      

Barbara Partee                               
Principal Investigator

Vladimir Borschev
Co-Principal Investigator

Consultants

Elena Paducheva, VINITI, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow
Senior Consultant

Ekaterina Rakhilina, VINITI, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow
Senior Consultant

Yakov Testelets, Russian State Humanities University, Moscow
Senior Consultant

Igor Yanovich, Graduate Student, Moscow State University, and research linguist, ABBYY software company, Moscow
Consultant

NSF research seminar on our earlier grant, same personnel: Barbara Partee, Vladimir Borschev, Ekaterina Rakhilina, Elena Paducheva, and Yakov Testelets at work, with tea, at VINITI RAN, Moscow, Summer 2002. Photo taken by Ji-yung Kim, research assistant from UMass, Amherst. http://people.umass.edu/partee/seminar.jpg

Past and Present Research Assistants

Amy Rose Deal
Graduate Student

Amy Rose has investigated 'weak' objects in the so-called antipassive construction in Nez Perce, an endangered Penutian language. This research involved both work from grammars and corpora and a field trip to obtain more nuanced semantic data in July 2006. Similarities between antipassive constructions and the Russian Genitive of Negation have been argued for by Bittner (p.c. to P.I.), whose work on antipassives in Greenlandic Eskimo was discussed in a Fall 2005 project meeting at UMass.

Liane Jeschull
Graduate Student: Ph.D. candidate, University of Leipzig, Visiting Scholar, UMass Amherst

Liane worked in the project in 2005 and has done research on the relationship between the Russian Genitive of Negation construction and the semantics of verbal aspect in transitive predicates.

Galina Lastovkina
Undergraduate Student

In the Fall semester of 2004, Galina Lastovkina helped the PI and co-PI with some exploratory corpus searches of several Russian corpora, studying the alternation of Genitive and Nominative and of Genitive and Accusative with various classes of verbs and with variation of several other relevant parameters.

Keir Moulton
Graduate Student

Among other things, Keir has helped the PI and co-PI to investigate the hypothesis that the Genitive of Negation construction involves a 'weakening' of the semantics of the Genitive-marked NP, in comparison to corresponding Nominative and Accusative-marked NPs, by searching for work on analogous phenomena in other languages. Part of his time was also spent on his own related research on the semantics of intensional-object constructions. He also works on inherently reflexive verbs.

Aynat Rubinstein
Graduate Student

Aynat carried out related research of her own within the project, namely on lexical and compositional aspects of the semantics of reciprocal verbs. At the heart of this project lies the alternation that relates non-reciprocal transitive verbs to two reciprocal constructions in Russian, English, and other languages. She is currently investigating the properties of comitative phrases in reciprocal constructions, and testing their relationship to the event semantics of high applicatives (Pylkkänen 2002).

Florian Schwarz
Graduate Student

Florian has carried out an in-depth investigation of intensional transitive verbs, which may directly relate to the Genitive of Negation construction, as proposed by Neidle and most recently in Olga Kagan's work. One central result of this work is that two types of intensional transitive verbs need to be distinguished (the 'look-for' class vs. the 'need' class), which differ with respect to both the syntactic make-up of their complement as well the semantic type.

Anna Verbuk
Graduate Student

Anna, who worked for the project in 2005 and 2006, has done research on the acquisition of the semantics of Russian ili 'or' in contexts where clause-mate negation is present. She also has helped the principal investigators with the Russian data, and spent 13 days in Moscow during Spring semester 2005, where she presented a paper in a grant-related workshop and consulted with Russian linguists and native speakers on several topics in Russian syntax and semantics.

Youri Zabbal
Graduate Student
Website Designer/Administrator

One large contribution to the project from Youri was to develop this website . Apart from that, he has done related research of his own on the semantics of proper names when they are coerced into 'weak' readings in various constructions in various languages, something which seems to happen in the Genitive of Negation construction, where it constitutes an unsolved problem for most theories of the semantics of Genitive of Negation.