The genitive accusative opposition in Slavic languages is a decades-old linguistic conundrum.
Shedding new light on this perplexing object-case alternation in Russian this volume analyzes
two variants of genitive objects that alternate with accusative complements-the genitive of
negation and the intensional genitive. The author contends that these variants are
manifestations of the same phenomenon and thus require an integrated analysis. Further that
the choice of case is sensitive to factors that fuse semantics and pragmatics and that the
genitive case is assigned to objects denoting properties at the same time as they lack
commitment to existence. Kagan's subtle analysis accounts for the complex relations between
case-marking and other properties such as definiteness specificity number and aspect. It
also reveals a correlation between the genitive case and the subjunctive mood and relates her
overarching subject matter to other instances of differential object-marking.
