Surrey Database of Short Term Morphosyntactic Change: Case assignment on direct objects of negated transitive verbs

The notion of 'short term morphosyntactic change' can be used to characterise changes
in the use of forms in a short period of time even when the forms themselves have
changed relatively little. The Short Term Morphosyntactic Change (STMC) Databases
explore change in six different morphosyntactic phenomena in Russian over a 200 year
period from 1801-2000.

In modern Russian we observe variation in the case used to mark the direct object of
a negated verb, either accusative or genitive. In earlier periods, the distribution
of the two cases with direct objects was clear-cut: the genitive marked the object of
negated verbs, while the accusative marked the object of non-negated verbs. In the
19th and early 20th centuries the accusative became an established alternative in
this construction, but its spread was rather slow. The rate of change increased in
the second half of the 20th century and by the end of this period the split between
accusative and genitive use was more or less equal. This is a dramatic shift over the
short term. The complexity of the factors involved in the choice has been well
established (see the classic articles by Restan 1960 and Timberlake 1975), and the
user can now research further. Statistics presented in the database reveal the impact
of the factors these authors identified, including verb aspect, the form of the
governing verb (finite vs. infinitive), the position of the negation in infinitival
constructions, and the lexico-semantic properties of the object noun. Statistical
analysis shows a subtle switch in the relative weight of these factors. The lexical
semantics of the object noun is much more important for genitive/accusative variation
now than it was before the middle of the 20th century, while the role of aspectual
semantics, which had been a dominating factor in previous periods, has now been
diminished under some syntactic conditions (with finite verbs) or reduced to
insignificance under others (with indirectly negated infinitives).