Hybrid Impersonal Constructions: The Battlefield of Sound and Sense

Abstract

Throughout its history the English language has seen a series of convulsions among impersonal verbs whereby some of them fell out of the word hoard while others survived either by recasting themselves into ordinary (personal) verbs or by taking on the form of stock phrases. The process of transition from an impersonal to a personal verb often involved a situation in which a potential pseudo-subject (or logical subject) in an oblique case promotes to the status of genuine (nominative) subject, demoting what was previously the syntactic subject to an oblique case. Sometimes, however, the process of reshuffling got checked by the strong tension between the impersonal and the personal forces of the verb that are tightly pitted against each other, neither winning over the other. While the contest was pending in that fashion and the grammar of the language has not yet arrived so far in development as to settle the matter, arbitrary compromises are effected between the contenders, often eventuating in peculiar constructions. Our discussion centers around a group of such peculiar constructions, touching on some points that, despite previous studies, still seem to beg clarification or at least redefinition.