The problem of the Genitive of negation is one of the most up-to-date in current Russian linguistic discussion. The nature of the Genitive Rule in Russian is still unclear and the register of...Show moreThe problem of the Genitive of negation is one of the most up-to-date in current Russian linguistic discussion. The nature of the Genitive Rule in Russian is still unclear and the register of papers devoted to this scientific question grows constantly. The Genitive Rule is also popular topic for researchers, whose scientific interest belongs to other Slavonic languages (for instance, Polish) or the same language family (for example, Lithuanian). Considering the relevance of the problem, it was decided to find out if the Genitive Rule also exists in Latvian language. During the theoretical part of the work, it turned out that, it is possible to use the negated Genitive in place of the Accusative with the transitive verbs, however, the use of the negated Genitive is rather archaic; it is stylistically marked, and, as a rule, it occurs in fiction. The negated Accusative shows dominance in modern literary Latvian. However, since literary Latvian is very young (about one hundred years), since the dominance of the negated Accusative in old Latvian was not proved, and, finally, since no special papers devoted to the Genitive of negation in Latvian exist, it was aimed to make a quantitative analysis of the situation in Old Latvian and Latvian dialects. For the above mentioned purposes, Latvian popular songs (dainas) were taken as a main source. The analysis of the work was carried out manually. After analyzing more than 20000 dainas, it was found out, that the negated Accusative was not unambiguously dominant before Latvian was codified. In additon to that, it was proved than in one region of Latvia (Latgale) the negated Genitive occurred even more frequent. The results and the corpus of current thesis could be very useful for further semantic and syntactic research.Show less
