Genitives, Types and Sorts

The topic. The genitive construction in Russian is used for many different relations. Our topic is the interplay between the semantics of the genitive construction(s), the lexical semantics of the head noun, the semantics of the genitive NP, and context. Our thesis is that many restrictions on felicitous and infelicitous uses of genitive constructions, and on the possible interpretations of felicitous uses, can be characterized in terms of sortal distinctions within the domain of entities, and corresponding sortal properties of both the head noun and the genitiv