Syntactic features of exceptive constructions with krome in Russian The meaning of exception can be expressed by various syntactic constructions with various lexical items: za iskl'ucheniem, krome, pomimo and others. All of them have the meaning `except', while some of them have also other meanings and can be used in different contexts. This talk will be devoted to the syntactic features of the word krome and their connection with semantics of the word. First of all, it is necessary to distinguish two types of the preposition krome: krome1 with the meaning of exception (1) and krome2 with the meaning of addition (2). (1) Vse prishli, krome Peti. all came except Peter `All but Peter came'. (2) Krome Peti prishla Masha. except Peter came Marie `Besides Peter, Marie came'. The main criterion to distinguish these two types of the preposition is below. In the case of krome1 only the predicate with the opposite polarity is true for an NP in the scope of krome: the example (1) is true if everybody came and Peter didn't come. In the case of krome2 the predicate is true both for NP in the main clause and for NP in the exceptive phrase: the example (2) means that Peter came and Marie came. This formal criterion allows to divide the majority of sentences with krome in two groups -- with krome1 and with krome2. However, this criterion meets with a problematic case -- sentences with lexical items that mean `the only': (3) Krome Peti ja edinstvennyj pianist. except Peter I the.only pianist `Besides Peter I am the only pianist'. If we consider `to be the only pianist' to be a predicate, then the criterion above doesn't work well: ?`I am the only pianist, and Peter is the only pianist'. I suppose that we deal with the existential quantifier in such sentences. According to this, the example (3) can be reformulated as `Besides Peter one pianist exists. This pianist is me'. In this case, the predicate is `exists' and krome in (3) can be interpreted as krome2. Some discussion of the assertion function of words with the meaning `the only' can be found in [Apresjan 2004: 486]. Sentences with krome1 and krome2 differs structurally. Thus, the almost obligatory condition for krome1 is the presence of the universal quantifier in the main clause. It follows from the meaning of the preposition: an NP in exceptive phrase expresses the set that is excluded from the larger, universal, set. Sometimes, the universal quantifier isn't expressed explicitly, but it is always implied. In the case of krome2 a combination of two sets -- in exceptive phrase and in main clause -- gives a universal set. For example, in (2) a combination of Peter and Marie is a universal set of all who came. However, the last structure is also possible for krome1: (4) Na koncert prishli pochti vse, krome Peti. to concert came almost all except Peter `Almost everybody but Peter came to the concert'. The combination of almost everybody and Peter gives a universal set of everybody who came to the concert. Nevertheless, the universal quantifier is always present (explicitly or implicitly) in such sentences, but with the word almost (or some other) that predicts the exception. Such sentences account for 6,5 % of all the examples with krome1 in data analysed1.