The Genitive of negation in Slovenian

In some languages there exist syntactic environments in which noun phrases of negated sentences do not take nominative or accusative case as their counterparts from the parallel affirmative sentences do. Instead, they are inflected for the genitive, usually called the genitive of negation. The article (i) reconsiders the list of these environments; (ii) describes an observation whereby the genitive of negation on the subject cancels the subject-verb agreement, triggering the default morphosyntactic form of the (auxiliary) verb; (iii) compares the distribution of the genitive of negation to the distribution of the negative-numeral nič “nothing”; and (iv) argues for the hypothesis that the genitive of negation is licensed by the covert version of the n-numeral nič “nothing”