ИСТИНА

The story of the second genitive is reminiscent of the scenario of another peripheral form, n-forms of the third person pronoun. What started out as a result of morphophonological reanalysis CVn preposition + V_ pronoun → CV preposition + nV_ pronoun expanded to other contexts and was eventually reassigned to a function, a dependent marking device on pronoun as a non-verbal complement. Locative (second prepositional)? It is more difficult to explain how this specific meaning form mapping was first established (may still be traceable in historical written corpora). It might be that the association built itself up, by recruiting new lexical items. The non-paritive uses of Gen2 are just leftovers from the situation where the form was associated with lexical items, not the function (when it still was a true formal variant). Explananda: a rare (?) case of a “functional variant”, a formal marker, in variant-ish distribution with another one, but only allowed in a subset of uses, some though not all connected to the partitive category. Paradigmatic constraints: result from paradigmatic integration of an assumedly independent declension class into another class (“implant”) at pre-written Russian level Functional properties of a partitive: result from a functional specification over the history of Russian, probably though attraction of the ending to a semantic subset of nouns (mass nouns) Non-partitive uses: leftovers over from the pre-functional stage of the form.