Kirill
Kozhanov
Institute
of Slavic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences
Johannes
Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
Studying variation in case marking: The
genitive of negation in Aukštaitian dialects of Lithuanian
This
paper examines the phenomenon of the genitive of negation (GenNeg) in the
Aukštaitian dialects of Lithuanian. It is shown that there is areal variation
in case marking of an object of a negated verb. West Aukštaitian dialetcs (the
Kaunas region) allow innovative accusative marking of an object of a negated
verb much more often (although not as often as is claimed in the dialect
descriptions) than South and East (the Vilnius region) Aukštaitian dialects
where the genitive marking is very consistent. Even though South Aukštaitian
has more examples of accusative marking than East Aukštaitian, the percentage
is still very small. Different types of negated contexts (local vs distant) are
not so relevant for the choice of case marking in South-East Aukštaitian, but
play a moderately significant role in West Aukštaitian: the accusative marking
is more common in distant negated contexts. In East Aukštaitian, direct objects
of infinitives embedded under negated verbs can also be marked by the
nominative, i.e. verbal negation does not affect the case marking of the so
called nominative objects.
Keywords: genitive of
negation, case marking, nominative objects, Lithuanian, dialectology, corpus
linguistics