Studying variation in case marking

Abstract

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.

The dual face of structural object case: on Lithuanian genitive of negation

“… [2] This paper examines GN in Standard Lithuanian, which, as we argue, is obligatorily realized on DPs which would typically be assigned structural accusative case. Nevertheless, West, East and South Aukštaitian dialects may allow accusative when negation is present (Mikulėnienė & Morkūnas 1997, Kozhanov 2017). We do not discuss this variation in these dialects. …”