Thread: нарушать + родительный падеж

Originally Posted by Antonio1986

Back to Genetive.
When someone enter in the shop I say to him:
Вы хотите / Вы хотели бы воду/пиво/вино?
They told my that is better to say: Вы хотите / Вы хотели бы воды/вина/пива?
The problem is that I don't understand whether this is Roditel'nyi or just Iminitel'nyi / Mnozhestvenoe chislo.

Yes, it is Genitive (родительный), but here you see its another usage - the so-called "partitive". Actually, there are traces of partitive in modern Russian where its form is slightly different from genitive, e.g. чай (nominative) - чая (pure genitive, as in "стакан чая", or "у меня нет чая") - чаю (partitive: Я хочу чаю - I would like some tea). The meaning of partitive is to convey the idea of "some": not all the tea, but just a limited amount of it. More details on this: Partitive - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Back again to this annoying Genetive:
"Вчера вечером я звонил тебе, но тебя не было дома".
Как вы объясняете это феномен. Why we don't use Ty. It is again Genetive of negation?

Originally Posted by Antonio1986

Back again to this annoying Genetive:
"Вчера вечером я звонил тебе, но тебя не было дома".
Как вы объясняете это феномен. Why we don't use Ty. It is again Genetive of negation?

не было + genetive. It's a set thing.

Не было стола
Не было денег

etc and etc

How do I explain it? Easily, one of the meanings of the genetive case is conveying absence or lack of someone of something. Here it perfectly corresponds to the absence meaning.

Just a quick heads up though. Don't confuse these two structures:

тебя не было дома vs ты не был дома.

They basically convey the same meaning but their grammatical structures are different

Originally Posted by Antonio1986

Back again to this annoying Genetive:
"Вчера вечером я звонил тебе, но тебя не было дома".
Как вы объясняете это феномен. Why we don't use Ty. It is again Genetive of negation?

And yes, it's genitive of negation. But here it is mandatory.

Нет + Gen. = There is no something;
Не было + Gen. = There was no something;
Не будет + Gen. = There will be no something.

Or somebody.

The word order can be changed. The genitive cannot be replaced by any other case.