There is a large literature on the problem of the "genitive of negation" in Russian, a construction that poses challenges for syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, as well as for the nature of the lexicon. The problem is illustrated in (1) and (2), two different ways to say "[the/an] answer hasn't arrived". Example (2) shows the genitive of negation: the subject is in the genitive case and the verb is in a non-agreeing impersonal form.

(1)	Otvet	iz	polka	ne	prišel.
	Answer-NOM.M.SG	from	regiment	NEG	arrived-M.SG

        'The answer from the regiment has not arrived.'

(2)	Otveta	iz	polka	ne	prišlo.
	Answer-GEN.M.SG	from	regiment	NEG	arrived-N.SG

        'There was no answer from the regiment.'

It is an interesting and non-trivial problem exactly what the alternation between nominative and genitive in such sentences depends on. Some (including Borschev and Partee (1998a)) have claimed that it depends on theme-rheme structure, following the foundational work of Babby (1980). The key idea there is that theme-rheme, or topic-focus, structure determines scope of negation, and scope of negation is in turn a crucial determinant of the occurrence of genitive of negation. On this analysis, otvet iz polka 'the/an answer from the regiment' in (1) is topic or theme, and remains outside the scope of negation; the existence of an answer is presupposed, and the sentence denies that it has arrived. By contrast, in (2) either there is no topic (Babby 1980) or the topic is an implicit location or situation argument (the location in which the answer is being awaited, the implicit goal argument of 'arrive'), and the scope of negation includes both the subject 'the/an answer from the regiment' and the verb 'arrived', asserting that no answer has arrived, and suggesting non-existence of an answer. The idea is that a subject outside the scope of negation gets Nominative case, whereas one within the scope of negation gets Genitive case.

As the very name of the construction suggests, almost everyone who has worked on the problem seems to agree that the occurrence of genitive of negation does indeed correlate with scope of negation; Pesetsky (1982) analyzes it as the reflecting the presence of a null negative polarity quantifier which takes a genitive complement. But not only are there complications related to the role of a sometimes implicit locative or situation argument, but also we have recently found some interesting apparent counterexamples in both directions -- genitives not in the scope of negation and nominatives in the scope of negation. Independent of topic-focus structure there seems to be some kind of 'perspective structure'. In some way or other, in a sentence with an NP and some kind of "location" (or spatiotemporal 'situation' or 'scene'), it seems that you get nominative when you structure the proposition "from the point of view of the NP" ('Tracking the answer' in (1)) and genitive when you structure the proposition "from the point of view of the location or scene" ('Watching the mailbox' in (2)). And that obviously interacts with topic-focus structure and other aspects of the discourse context, but it may not reduce to any clearly established distinction existing in the literature. (By normal criteria of word order and intonation, 'answer' is topic in both (1) and (2), contra Babby.)

References

Babby, Leonard. 1980. Existential Sentences and Negation in Russian. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Karoma Publishers.

Babby, Leonard. ms. 2000. The genitive of negation and unaccusativity. Ms., Princeton University.

Borschev, Vladimir and Barbara H. Partee. 1998a. Formal and Lexical Semantics and the Genitive in Negated Existential Sentences in Russian. In Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics: The Connecticut Meeting 1997, ed. Z"eljko Boskovic', Steven Franks and William Snyder. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 75-96.

Borschev, Vladimir and Barbara H. Partee. 1998b. Bytijnye predlozhenija i otricanie v russkom jazyke: semantika i kommunikativnaja struktura. [Existential sentences and negation in Russian: semantics and communicative structure]. In A.S. Narin'yani (ed.), Dialogue '98: Computational Linguistics and its Applications. Kazan: Xeter, 173-182.

Bresnan, Joan and Jonni Kanerva. 1989. Locative inversion in Chichewa: A case study of factorization in grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 20, 1-50.

Erteschik-Shir, Nomi. 1997. The Dynamics of Focus Structure. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press. [Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 84]

Paducheva, Elena V. 1992. O semantichiskeskom podxode k sintaksi-su i genitivnom sub"ekte glagola BYT'. Russian Linguis-tics 16, 53-63.

Paducheva, Elena V. 1997. Roditel'nyj sub"ekta v otricatel'nom predlozenii: sintaksis ili semantika? Voprosy Jazykoznanija No.2, 101-116.

Perlmutter, David and John Moore (1999) Syntactic universals and language-particular morphology: Russian impersonals. Talk given at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, April 1999.

Pesetsky, David. 1982. Paths and Categories, MIT: Ph.D. dissertation.

Szabolcsi, Anna. 1986. From the definiteness effect to lexical integrity. In W. Abraham and Sj. de Meij, eds., Topic, Focus, and Configurationality. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 321-348.

Ward, Gregory and Betty Birner. 1995. "Definiteness and the English existential", Language 71, 722-742.