The Russian genitive within the NP and the VP

This paper deals with the genitive case in Russian as present within the NP and the VP. We argue that although semantic factors sometimes condition genitive marking, the Russian genitive is not sensitive to the thematic properties of the head and is therefore closer to the structural cases, assigned on purely configurational grounds. From a semantic point of view, the genitive is often related to quantification, indefiniteness, partitivity and decreased referentiality. The common denominator for all types of genitive studied in this paper appears to be the fact that the nominal in the genitive denotes a property rather than an entity and can be analyzed as an N rather than an NP or a DP.