Impersonal Constructions Research Articles

Adamic Awakening and the Feeling of Being Alive in Paradise Lost

Adamic Awakening and the Feeling of Being Alive in Paradise Lost Timothy M. Harrison Alone in Eden, Adam invites speculation. Naked, newly created, and without precedent, he encourages numerous traditions to imagine the human condition in its purity, stripped of historical and social contingencies. He acts as a cultural myth that enables the erasure of culture. Adam occupies a privileged position in the writings of pre-modern philosophers, scientists, poets, and playwrights.1 Modern thinkers have inherited this legacy by continuing to take Adam as an exemplary figure in their work. To take one example, in 1910, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset composed an essay entitled “Adam in Paradise,” in which he employs Adam to express the essence of the human condition: “Adam in paradise is life, pure and simple.”2 For Ortega, Adam opens a general philosophy of life based on a living body’s encounter with an unfamiliar world. Adam allows Ortega to develop an account of life as it is experienced naïvely, in a state that is “pure and simple,” free from the sediment of scientific explanation. To understand life as it is lived, Ortega imagines Adam. The inspiration for his project may have derived from Paradise Lost, an epic poem in which John Milton imagines Adam by coming to an [End Page 29] understanding of life. In his attempt to inhabit and express Adam’s experience, Milton articulates the basic structures of human vitality. Engaged in a prolonged discussion with the angel Raphael, Adam relates his “story,” a first-person narrative describing how he awoke, explored his environment, met God, and participated in the creation of Eve.3 Michael Lieb contends that to “engage Adam’s account, his story, is to involve oneself in the phenomenon of personal experience, the narrative of selfhood ‘writ large.’ It is to turn inward toward self and to experience with the teller the intimate details of his life.”4 Milton extends to his readers an invitation to participate in the original moments of human existence. This invitation is implicit in the opening line of Adam’s story: “For man to tell how human life began / Is hard” (PL 8.250–51). The subject of this narrative is the beginning of “human life,” a topic simultaneously personal and general. Adam’s story applies to his individual experience of vitality and to the shared future of humanity as a species. In describing how “human life began,” Milton enters into Edenic experience and encourages his readers to grasp their own lives anew by seeing through Adam’s eyes and feeling through his skin. At the center of Adam’s account is a basic awareness of life, a feeling of being alive that forms the background for his encounters with both himself and the world around him. As Daniel Heller Roazen demonstrates, waking from sleep is a privileged experience from which to observe and gain access to a pre-personal sense of existence that is normally hidden behind the alertness of fully awakened attention.5 In the words of Paul Valéry, “One should not say I wake … but There is waking [Il y a éveille]—for the I is the result.”6 Valéry uses an impersonal construction—Il y a éveille—to emphasize how sometimes at the moment of awakening, one is not yet able to clearly differentiate between subject and object. Such moments present themselves simply as a happening or felt occurrence. I follow the philosopher Evan Thompson’s lead and suggest that this pre-reflective happening expresses the feeling of being alive.7 It is this feeling that Milton’s Adam experiences when he awakens into human awareness for the first time. [End Page 30] Research in philosophy, biology, and neuroscience has begun to explore this feeling, which is situated at the border between life processes and experience.8 Languages other than English register the deep connection between these modes of existence. In German, for example, the emergence of Erleben from Leben verbally encodes the way that experience is necessarily tethered to life.9 In the contemporary disciplines concerned with the study of the mind, there is an increasing acknowledgment that processes once thought confined to the...

Möhlig-Falke, Ruth. 2012. The Early English Impersonal Construction. An Analysis of Verbal and Constructional Meaning

Möhlig-Falke, Ruth. 2012. The Early English Impersonal Construction. An Analysis of Verbal and Constructional Meaning

The Relevance of Constructions for the Interpretation of Modal Meaning: The Case of Must

This paper is concerned with the interpretation of the meanings of the modal must as seen from the perspectives of constructions. Based on an examination of the occurrences of must in the Brown and Switchboard corpora, it will be seen that constructions play an important role in how modal meanings are conveyed and perceived. Different registers use different constructions and certain constructions have different favoured interpretations depending on whether they are used in spoken or written language. This paper focuses on a number of different phenomena, namely the interaction of person and modal meaning, with emphasis on the interaction of first person singular and on impersonal constructions, and on the collocations of must and other verbal material. It is shown that must behaves differently in spoken and written registers with respect to these parameters, using different constructions in each register. These findings are checked against findings from comparable studies. It has been claimed that must is losing ground in favour of modals such as have to and need to . This paper interprets these claims as a sign that must is realigning its use with respect to the constructions it appears in. This is exemplified by looking at the use of must and progressive constructions and at the use of must in constructions with a main verb.

Traces of non-nominative alignment in Lithuanian: the impersonal constructions in Indo-European perspective

NENOMINATYVINĖS SANDAROS PĖDSAKAI LIETUVIŲ KALBOJE: BEASMENĖS KONSTRUKCIJOS IS INDOEUROPIETISKOSIOS PERSPEKTYVOS Santrauka Straipsnyje tiriamos lietuvių kalbos beasmenės konstrukcijos, ypac su eksperiento predikatais, žyminciais fizinį procesą, pvz.: gelti , skaudėti ar sopėti , mausti , persėti , troskinti , dusinti , pykinti , niežėti . Siai nedidelei veiksmažodžių klasei būdingas nekanoninis subjekto žymėjimas: asmens kūno dalys, kurias veikia skausmas, reiskiamos galininku, o ne vardininku, kaip būtų galima tikėtis. Toks principas yra aiskus: galininkas, t.y. prototipinis objekto linksnis, is prigimties neaktyvus, panaudojamas žymėti ir neagentinaim, neaktyviam subjektui, kuris nereguliuoja veiksmažodinio proceso. Tokiose konstrukcijose, kaip man skauda galvą galininkas nurodo kūno dalį, tiesiogiai įtrauktą į veiksmažodinį procesą; tuo tarpu naudininkas žymi objektą, kurio rysys su procesu yra periferinis, ir turi posesyvine reiksme ( dativus sympatheticus ). Analizėje isryskinti duomenys nepriestarauja įvairių indoeuropiecių kalbų tyrimų rezultatams ir remia tuos mokslininkus, kurie mano, kad ide. prokalbės ankstyvaisiais laikais tam tikruose diasistemos lygiuose sintaksinės sandaros principai nebuvo paremti akuzatyvinių kalbų principais.

Dėl baltų kalbų nenominatyvinės praeities

ON THE NON-NOMINATIVE PAST OF THE BALTIC LANGUAGESSummaryThe article enumerates the main works (from 1901 up to 1970) on the non-nominative (ergative) structure of the Indo-European and Baltic parent languages; in the latter the lability of such verbs as virti, sverti, genetivus auctoris and impersonal constructions with object nominative are pointed out to be remnants of its ergativism. Genetivus auctoris shows that an action be­longs to its actor and so reflects the archaic Indo-European ergative case from which nominative and genetive have descended. Sentences of visa vagių išvogta type repeat the ergative pattern with vagių as a subject in the „ergative“ case, visa – an object in the „absolute“ case and with predicate išvogta as a seminominal form naming action. Impersonal variants of this pattern may be senten­ces of the type vãgos išarta and reikia vãgos išarti, the predicate of the latter being an extended predicate of the former: reikia = reikta (impersonal form naming action). A premise for the nomi­native mounting of the object was the developing of concording of the logical subject with intransitive verb in favour of acc./nom. neutrius as much as in favour of nom. communis in which concording of the logical subject with a transitive verb was developing. This fact weakened the differentiation between acc./nom. neutrius = acc. communis and nom. communis and stimulated the possibility to preserve the sameness of the logical object and the logical subject (the latter earlier connected with intransitive verb) also in the shape of nom. communis. The existence of similar constructions with object nominative in Slavic, Sanskrit, Uralic and Altaic languages is to be explained as coming from the ergative structure of the Boreal (nostratic) super-system. The ergative structure decaying, the homonymy of cases arising in the nominative system in place of the fewer number of former cases brought forth the appearing of synonymous case forms, e.g. I.-E. non-ergat. >nom., non-nom. *-ā = non-nom. *-āi (-i arisen at the same time as in o/e-stems) → nom. *-āi from what have developed Latin nom., dat. -ae, gen. -ae<-āi< *-āi (-i perceived as a genitive marker and so lengthen­ed at the same time as in (according to V. Mažiulis) gen. (lup)-ī< *(ulp?)-i) and Prussian nom. (st)ai. It seems possible that the „confusion“ of cases in the Prussian Catechisms is partly to be explained in the same way. All discussed has the best parallels in the history of Baltic pronouns (see tables).

Безличные предложения в русском и норвежском языках

The article deals with impersonal constructions in the Russian and Norwegian languages, with the special focus on translatability. Examples, taken from the Russian-Norwegian corpus RuN, demonstrate that given little analogy between Russian and Norwegian impersonal constructions, there is some correspondence (if not equivalence) between the two classes.

Constructions, Word Grammar, and grammaticalization

Abstract In this paper, I explore the hypothesis that constructions — here understood primarily as the dependencies of Word Grammar — can undergo systematic change, sometimes partly due to the effects of the grammaticalization of a lexical item or class of lexical items. I argue that the development of will as a future tense marker in English involves the development of a new construction where two separate syntactic items are associated with a single event in the semantics. I also look at the loss of the impersonal construction in English, where it has been argued that the change is driven by an increase in the schematicity of the Transitive Construction, as well as having been argued that dative experiencers have been reclassified as subjects. I observe that it has also been noted that dative experiencers could function as subjects in earlier varieties of English, and suggest that this is an example of category strengthening.

Towards a typology of third person plural impersonals

Although third person plural impersonal constructions (3pl IMPs) are widely attested crosslinguistically, they have not yet been the main subject of a typological study. This paper aims to establish the basis for such a study by applying a tentative but rather elaborate typology of 3pl IMPs, developed by Cabredo Hofherr (2003, 2006), to a sample of European languages. The typology recognizes as many as five different types of impersonal uses of the 3pl: a) the universal, b) corporate, c) vague, d) inferential and e) specific. This typology is tested on the basis often European languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Russian and Spanish) using data stemming from a parallel translation corpus of Harry Potter and also acceptability judgments elicited from speakers by means of a questionnaire. The investigation reveals that while all the languages in the sample have universal, corporate and vague 3pl IMPs, the specific are at best marginal in English, Dutch, French, German and Polish, as are also the inferred in English, French and German. These findings are shown to correlate in part with the morphophonological realization of the 3pl IMP (as a free vs. a bound form), which may be interpreted as a reflection of the degree of grammaticalization of 3pl IMPs but also the result of the nature of the alternative impersonalizing constructions available among the relevant languages. The distribution of the five types of 3pl IMPs together with a sixth type is captured in the form of a preliminary semantic map, the nature of which requires substantiation by wider crosslinguistic data. The discussed typology of 3pl IMPs is found to be a promising basis for a wider typological investigation, provided a separate type of 3pl IMP involving the category of speech act verbs is included and the use of the 3pl for events which necessarily (not only contingently) involve singular individuals, nonhumans or alternatively the speech act participants are catered for.

Análisis del dativo en construcciones impersonales: los conceptos de sujeto y de semisujeto en griego antiguo

Impersonal constructions holding a complement both in dative and genitive are attested in Greek with a few verbs, which share the property of expressing the interests or the needs of human beings. These constructions, which occur in several ancient Indo- European languages, are documented in the post- Homeric period in the case of Greek. In the opposite, personal constructions, which appear more recently in other languages, are already documented in Greek since Homer’s times. The dative in the impersonal construction refers to human entities, codes the Experiencer and it is also the topic. These properties, which are close to those of the prototypical subject, seem to allow the dative to show some subject-like syntactic behaviour. In fact, we will argue that the dative in the impersonal construction behaves as a semi-subject, i. e. a verbal complement which, regardless of its coding, does have a set of properties that are typically associated with the subject in Greek. As well as the complement in dative, the complement in genitive in the impersonal construction exhibits a syntactic behaviour similar to the subject. However, the genitive does not follow the same patterns the dative does in the impersonal construction.

From third plural to passive

This paper explores the development of third person plural impersonal constructions into passive ones with the aim of determining the conditions most conducive to the emergence of a canonical passive, i.e. one which is both promotional (with an overt lexical subject) and agentive (with an overt agent). On the basis of cross-linguistic data it is argued that the required conditions are, on the one hand, the existence of a morphological alignment which does not distinguish between the O of a transitive clause and the S of a passive one and, on the other hand, the availability of highly grammaticalized third person plural impersonals, i.e. ones which can be used in episodic contexts and with different types of agents, among them individual and specific ones. The documented rarity of promotional passives originating from third person plural impersonal constructions is attributed to the rarity of the coincidence of the above two sets of independent factors.

Impersonality and Grammatical Metaphors in Scientific Discourse

Corpus-based research of scientific articles in the social sciences in Hebrew demonstrates different kinds of impersonal constructions characteristic of this genre, among them various uses of grammatical metaphors. An analysis of this data from the rhetorical perspective makes it possible to point to the rhetorical roles performed by impersonal constructions. They serve the ‘rhetoric of objectivity’ and the ethos of the credible and uninvolved researcher, and present the research as an entity independent of and separate from the researcher. The author’s absence from the cognitive actions that underlie the text, in particular the drawing of conclusions, presents the conclusions as those that any rational reader would draw given the same data. Impersonal constructions involve the reader in the cognitive activities that underlie the scientific paper and create common ground between the writer and reader. Viewed from the rhetorical perspective, grammatical metaphors appear to be rhetorical devices that serve the entire range of goals of the author, as a member of the scientific community.

Case and Events in Transitive Impersonals

This paper provides an event-structural analysis of accusative assignment in Ukrainian and Russian impersonal predicates. Constructions in which accusative occurs in the absence of an external argument, i.e., Transitive Impersonals, are found to be necessarily dyadic and causative: one argument identifies a causing or initiating event while a second argument is associated with the verb's core meaning. The causing event is introduced by a syntactic head within the verb's extended functional projection that is responsible for accusative valuation, but is not argument-projecting (following Pylkkänen 2008). Event structure is thereby linked directly to Case, further elucidating the role of v in accusative valuation, and providing new evidence for event decompositional approaches to syntax. Additional support for this approach is adduced from a non-cognate impersonal construction in Russian.

Hybrid Impersonal Constructions: The Battlefield of Sound and Sense

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.

Existential Constructions in Isbukun Bunun

This paper has two main goals. First, I demonstrate how the peculiar morpho-syntactic properties of the theme NPs in Isbukun Bunun existential sentences can be derived under an expletive account. The properties under investigation include structural Case marking, the emergence of definiteness restrictions, and the resistance of theme NPs to Ā-extraction. Second, I argue for a small clause analysis of existential sentences in Isbukun Bunun. In particular, based on word orders, island effects, the comparison with possessive constructions, and the coordination facts, I argue that the existential predicate in Isbukun Bunun selects a small clause as its sole internal argument. I also discuss how the proposal developed for Isbukun Bunun might generalize to, and shed light on, the impersonal constructions in natural languages.

The typology of semantic alignment (review)

Reviewed by: The typology of semantic alignment Åshild Næss The typology of semantic alignment. Ed. by Mark Donohue and Søren Wichmann. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xvi, 465. ISBN 9780199238385. $130 (Hb). The topic of this volume has been discussed in linguistic literature under many names: active-stative languages, agent-patient marking, split-S, split intransitivity. The book undertakes the commendable double effort of straightening out the terminology and attempting to provide clear definitions of what should count as semantic alignment, on the one hand, and significantly expanding the amount and range of available data on languages with semantic alignment, on the other. But this is more than a compendium of languages with semantic alignment (SA); it is, in fact, an argument for a holistic view of alignment in general. The major achievement of this book is that it succeeds in showing SA not as a rare and exotic phenomenon but as conditioned by the same types of properties that shape other areas of grammar. A striking example is GARY HOLTON's paper on the North Halmaheran languages of Eastern Indonesia, which examines ten closely related languages with very similar person-marking systems, and shows how minor and strictly formal differences between these systems nudge the languages back and forth, as it were, across the semantic-syntactic divide. The emphasis in several papers on the diachronic development of [End Page 713] SA patterns from other types of structures, or vice versa, further strengthens the presentation of SA as being closely related to other structural phenomena. Not only is alignment a continuum, as Johanna Nichols concludes; but the properties that are relevant to SA systems are also no different from those posited in linguistic literature as relevant to other aspects of clausal morpho-syntax, such as transitivity, experiencer subjects, and impersonal constructions. The first two papers, by the volume's editors, explain the choice of the term 'semantic alignment' as a broad overarching term in opposition to 'syntactic alignment', which would cover any system based on grammatical relations rather than semantic roles (SØREN WICHMANN), and set out to clarify just what should be included in the definition of semantic alignment, and what should fall outside it (MARK DONOHUE). The decision to introduce yet another term into the existing proliferation is well argued and well motivated, but would have appeared more like a genuine improvement if all contributors to the volume had consistently used it; since not all of them do, one is left with the question of what chance the new term has of catching on. Donohue's paper is a detailed and thorough exposition of the various marking phenomena that may be semantically conditioned, and which of these should be counted as SA. The next two chapters situate SA, synchronically and diachronically, within a larger grammatical context. ANDREJ MALCHUKOV makes a case for a diachronic connection between SA, experiencer subjects, and transitive impersonal ('transimpersonal') constructions, arguing that the functional pressure to 'upgrade' the highly prominent experiencer argument to subject position favors the development of SA from transimpersonals, and that certain structural factors make some languages more susceptible to such reanalysis than others, namely object-agreement marking on the verb and the absence of overt marking of third-singular subjects. PETER ARKADIEV compares the parameters governing SA in Loma, Georgian, Bats, Tabassaran, and Central Pomo. He shows that, contrary to claims by, for example, Primus (1999), the choice of S encoding is not determined by the total number of proto-agent or proto-patient properties exhibited by an argument; instead, each language selects a single property or group of properties that determines S marking. Both papers do a good job of demonstrating that the properties governing SA fit neatly into analyses proposed for the domain of transitive morphosyntax in general; Arkadiev's paper in particular is precise and to the point, though a broader study would be needed to confirm the general validity of his analyses. The remainder of the book examines SA systems in languages from different geographical regions. Part 2, with four papers, covers Eurasia. In a lexical-typological study exploring argument-encoding patterns crosslinguistically, J...

Seem and evidentiality

The paper is an empirical, corpus-based analysis of the functions of seem with different complementation structures and in impersonal constructions as well as in combinations with an experiencer. The focus is on describing how evidentiality (e.g. inferencing/observation or hearsay evidence) interacts with degrees of certainty or factivity of the construction. Other features are subjectivity and intersubjectivity (shared or non-shared information). Translations from English into Swedish have been used to get a more fine-grained picture of the degree of certainty expressed by seem and its relationship to the type of evidence. The different constructions with seem and their functions are explained in a grammaticalization perspective. Seem conforms to a number of principles such as layering and divergence (Hopper). Seem to is the most grammaticalized form and can be regarded as an evidential marker which is similar to the modal auxiliaries.

Les centres d'intérêt de l'énoncé et la cohérence textuelle en polonais et russe

Centra uwagi wypowiedzenia a spójność tekstu w językach słowiańskich Artykuł wskazuje na stosowalność pojęć Meta-Informacyjnej Teorii Centrów Uwagi (skrót angielski: MIC) w opisie języków o tak zwanym wolnym szyku tak jak j. słowiańskich w kontfrontacji z językami o tak zwanym ustalonym szyku (jak francuski lub angielski). Dajemy również krótki zarys właściwości morfemów to (i èto) w językach polskim i rosyjskim w wypowiedzeniach, w których występują one jako partykuły meta- informacyjne. W teorii MIC termin informacja odnosi się do treści semantycznej wypowiedzenia, natomiast termin meta-informacja do jej porządku sekwencyjnego. W Semantyce Asocjacyjnej (skrót angielski: AS) sytuacje są formalizowane jako statyczne lub dynamiczne, zakotwiczone w czasie i przestrzeni; jako sytuacje, w których różni uczestnicy (istoty żywotne lub nieżywotne) pełnią role neutralne (w stanach) oraz aktywne, bierne lub pośrednie (w czynnościach). Spośród tych składników sytuacji osoba mówiąca wyróżnia globalne pierwszorzędne centrum uwagi (podmiot) oraz jedno albo dwa (lub nawet więcej) lokalne (dopełnienia bliższe i dalsze). Ponadto predykacja polega na przypisywaniu określonym składnikom wypo- wiedzenia statutów metainformacyjnych o wartościach danej lub nowej. W j. polskim i rosyjskim podmiot wypowiedzenia wyraża fraza nominalna w mianowniku (związana z czasownikiem związkiem zgody). Uczestnik w pozycji podmiotu może pełnić różne role semantyczne (najczęściej czynną ale także i bierną lub średnią jak i w innych j. akuzatywnych). Diateza (pod którą rozumiem zarówno strony czynną i bierną jak i konstrukcje bezosobowe) jest środkiem spójności tekstu, kiedy uczestnik sytuacji wyróżniony jako globalne centrum uwagi nie występuje w roli czynnej. Konstrukcje bierne bywają często używane bez frazy dopełnieniowej, co pozwala pozostawić rolę czynną jako w ogóle nie wyrażoną (z powodu braku wiedzy na jej temat lub tylko z braku poświęcenia jej uwagi). Z drugiej zaś strony w konstrukcjach bezosobowych globalne centrum uwagi (czyli podmiot) jest traktowane jako nieokreślone, zwane w naszej teorii podmiotem anonimowym: jedyna informacja zawarta w wypowiedzeniu na jego temat dotyczy przynależności do klasy istot ±ludzkich. Wypowiedzenia, w których podmiot i orzeczenie cechuje ten sam statut meta-informacyjny (dany lub nowy), nazywamy podstawowymi. W rozszerzonych wypowiedzeniach zaś centrum uwagi wskazuje na wyróżnioną fraze nominalną kontrastującą z resztą wypowiedzenia: topik o danym statucie kontrastujący z nowym komentarzem lub nowy fokus kontrastujący z danym tłem. W j. polskim i rosyjskim w wypowiedzeniach podstawowych szyk wyrazów służy głównie do wyrażania informacji albo całkiem nowych albo całkiem danych. W j. francuskim i angielskim natomiast szyk w wypowiedzeniu podstawowym w pierwszym rzędzie służy do odróżnienia podmiotu od dopełnienia. W j. słowiańskich (nie tylko w j. polskim i rosyjskim) w wypowiedzeniach rozszerzonych centra uwagi (topik i fokus) są uwydatnione przede wszystkim przez szyk wyrazów w połączeniu z intonacją oraz opcjonalnie przy pomocy wykładników morfologicznych (m. in. partykuł, mocnych lub słabych zaimków osobowych). Jednakże w j. polskim i rosyjskim topiicalizacja lub foka- lizacja bywają często wyrażane jedynie przez szyk wyrazów. W językach tych albowiem szyk wyrazów jest głównym wykładnikiem spójności tekstu: takie słabe topiki czy też takie słabe fokusy sprawiają najwięcej trudności francusko- lub angielsko-języcznym tłumaczom, którzy potrafią oddawać wiernie treść słowiańskiego tekstu w j. francuskim lub angielskim, lecz równocześnie zatracają całkowicie jego spójność.

Inherent case as a licensing condition for A-movement: The case of hyper-raising constructions in Brazilian Portuguese

Assuming with Ferreira (2000, 2004, forthcoming) and Rodrigues (2002, 2004) that referential null subjects in (Colloquial) Brazilian Portuguese (BP) are traces of A-movement, this paper specifically focuses on hyper-raising constructions in BP. I argue that in impersonal constructions the embedded CP and the embedded subject (or an embedded topic) may compete for purposes of agreement with the matrix T. The embedded CP is generally the winner as it is more local. However, if it is assigned inherent Case by the matrix predicate, it becomes inactive and no longer competes with an embedded DP. In these circumstances, an embedded subject or topic can then move to the matrix [Spec,TP], yielding subject or topic hyper-raising constructions, respectively.

Ways of attenuating agency in Russian

AbstractThis article focuses on grammatical constructions that attenuate or eliminate the expression of agency in Russian, using the frameworks of Radical Construction Grammar and Cognitive Grammar. Emphasis is on the organization of these constructions in larger networks of related personal and impersonal constructions, with impersonal constructions as peripheral members of the system. More specifically, we compare the role of the dative case in impersonal constructions containing a finite verb and an infinitive and demonstrate that there are two such constructions, which has implications for the concepts of main verb‐hood and agentivity. This type of nuanced analysis takes into account factors such as case semantics and relationships among constructions in assessing how agency is assigned or avoided in Russian impersonal constructions, hence makes it possible to tease apart the differences between two impersonal constructions that appear identical in structure.

Impersonal is Personal: Finnish perspectives

AbstractOur paper discusses the notion ‘impersonal’ in the light of Finnish and current functionally oriented research on Finnish grammar. The constructions discussed exhibit one or several of the properties associated with impersonals. Many of them involve a human participant. Investigation of actual language use shows that the human participant is often interpreted as a speech act participant. Thus, paradoxically, impersonal constructions are closely intertwined with the expression of person in Finnish. At least the following properties seem to be involved in various treatments of impersonal constructions: (i) lack of grammatical person opposition; (ii) lack of an Agent or other primary argument in the argument structure; (iii) non‐subject‐like (oblique) coding of primary argument; and (iv) identity of primary argument is left open. There seems to be no one single property that impersonal constructions share. This underlines the fact that the notion of ‘impersonal’ is not a coherent concept but rather a set of features. Thus, impersonality may be a useful conceptual tool for cross‐linguistic comparison because it directs the analysts’ attention to phenomena that may share some properties, but it does not seem to be a necessary notion in the description of individual languages.