This squib accounts for the inconsistencies in the occurrence of genitive of negation with the Russian verb byt’ ‘to be’ and other genitive verbs by distinguishing two independent lexical entries for byt’ with a specified location that have differing syntactic and semantic characteristics. One is predicative/argument-taking, while the other is the copula in a copular construction with a locational prepositional predicate. Sentential negation invariably assigns genitive of negation to the grammatical subject of the copular construction, whereas the subject of predicative byt’ is in the wrong syntactic configuration to receive genitive of negation and therefore receives nominative case via agreement with the finite Infl.