Existentials, Modals and the Ontology of States Anton V. Zimmerling Pushkin State Russian Language Institute/ Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Science fagraey64@hotmail.com Abstract I discuss holistic and partial predicate ontologies, with focus on the realization of static spatiotemporal predicates in Russian and Bulgarian. I follow the distribution of three constructions with dative case marking on the semantic subject. Modern Bulgarian and Modern Russian share only one of them — dative-predicative structures (DPS), while Russian and Old Slavic languages also use dative-infinitive structures (DIS) as the main cue of expressing the meaning of external modality. The third type — hybrid predicates headed by a negative existential — is a bridge construction between DIS and DPS. Hybrid predicates like негде спать ‘no place to sleep’, некого винить ‘no one to blame’ originated in Old Russian as embedded DIS sentences, but drifted towards DPS. They are partly integrated in the ontology of the Modern Russian DPS construction and behave as modal predicatives with a number of deviating features. Key words: natural language ontology, Davidsonian states, modals, existentials, predicatives, Russian language, Bulgarian language, biclausality 1. Natural language ontology 1.1. Davidsonian states, spatiotemporality and holistic ontologies. Natural language ontologies distinguish between static and dynamic situations. Dynamic situations consist of non-homogeneous phases and involve a transition from p to ~ p. Vendler (1957) lists three types of dynamic situations — a) activities, cf. run, drive, b) accomplishments, i.e. incremental or gradual predicates, cf. build a house, c) achievements, i.e. predicates of an instantaneous transition, cf. notice. These three are opposed to a single class of states. Vendler’s classification does not capture the distinction between two types of static situations, from the 1960-s on called Kimian and Davidsonian states [Maienborn 2007]. Pre- theoretically, Kimian states can be conceived as atemporal things, results of measurement, assessments or evaluations, cf. These tomatoes weigh 3 kilos, while Davidsonian states are spatiotemporal things, which hold during a period time, cf. These tomatoes were already rotten, when John saw them. If p is a Davidsonian state and holds in some locus during an interval starting from t 0 and ending in t n , p is true in this locus for every time point t i  {t 0 …t n }, so that p consists of homogeneous phases [Davidson 1980]. Dynamic predicates do not fit the homogeneity criterion, while Kimian states and one-place nominal/adjectival