Alcune osservazioni sulle strutture genitivo-locative, strumentali e comitative in russo e le proprietà di inclusione (sottoinsieme/soprainsieme)

In this paper I will argue that the behaviour of Russian oblique cases can be dealt with in terms of ‘zonal inclusion’ properties, whereby the Instrumental encodes inclusion (part-of, contained-in relation) of the inflected noun into the denotation of its sister projection; Genitive, Dative and Prepositive lexicalize the opposite relation (container, possessor, etc.). I will also maintain that prepositions are just modifiers of the inflectional head, thus unifying a preposition selecting for multiple cases like s (with apparently idiosyncratic meanings: ‘with’, ‘from’, ‘of-the-same-size-of’) under a single lexical entry.