Accusative of negation in \u2018Borderland\u2019 Polish

Abstract

The paper aims at offering a descriptive analysis of case under sentential negation in the pre-World War II urban dialect of Lviv, one of the key historical ‘Borderland’ varieties of Polish which developed under strong Ukrainian influence. In this dialect, the direct internal argument in negated sentences could surface either in the genitive or accusative case. This is in contrast to other varieties of Polish, including Standard Polish, where it must be in the genitive. A distributional analysis of the data available suggests that the variation was not random. It was conditioned by the semantics of the object: The accusative was available if the noun phrase was definite. The genitive was not subject to any constraints. I shall argue that this represents a mixed grammar of case under negation: the Standard Polish model as well as a dialectal model. The latter emerged under Ukrainian influence. This mixed model is ultimately based on the availability of two types of negation phrase in Lviv ‘Borderland’ Polish, one without any scope features as in Standard Polish, and one with a negated quantificational scope feature as in East Slavonic.