Impersonal Verbs and Their Lexical Specification

Abstract

These so-called impersonal verbs share a number of syntactic and semantic properties. In this paper we will concentrate on the following interesting fact about these verbs (which to the best of my knowledge has been not previously noticed): IMPERSONAL VERBS IN RUSSIAN DO NOT FORM ACTIVE PARTICIPLES OR GERUNDS. Thus the paradigm of an impersonal verb like tosnit' does not include forms like *tonjalfiij, *tognivgij, *toinja, or *togniv. The discussion will center on the most appropriate way to incorporate facts like this into the grammar of Russian. One possible way is to treat the nonoccurrence of these forms as accidental gaps in the paradigm of these verbs and simply to enter this information in some convenient way in the lexical entry for the verb (e.g., as a feature). In other words we can treat the nonoccurrence of forms like *tonja.Sij etc. the same way that we must treat the nonoccurrence of forms like *pobeZu/*pobeidu (1sg. pres. of pobedit'), as phonologically, morphologically, syntactically, and semantically unmotivated gaps that must be listed in the lexicon.2 But by separately marking each impersonal verb as not having a gerund or active participle we miss a generalization: this fact seems to be a class property and should not have to be repeated for each member of the class. We can get around this problem by incorporating this fact into the grammar of Russian by means of a lexical redundancy rule which states that verbs that cannot occur with a subject lack gerund and active participle forms.3 But even this proposal seems to be based on the assumption that the two facts are unrelated and that there is no causal relationship between the absence of a subject NP and the lack of gerund and active participle forms. There is a large class of verbs in Russian which provides evidence that these defects in the paradigm of impersonal verbs are not accidental gaps