Impersonal Se
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Impersonal Se
Impersonality may refer to: * Impersonal passive voice, a verb voice that decreases the valency of an intransitive verb to zero * Impersonal verb In linguistics, an impersonal verb is one that has no determinate subject. For example, in the sentence "''It rains''", ''rain'' is an impersonal verb and the pronoun ''it'' does not refer to anything. In many languages the verb takes a third per ...
, a verb that cannot take a true subject {{Disambig ...
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Impersonal Passive Voice
The impersonal passive voice is a verb voice that decreases the valency of an intransitive verb (which has valency one) to zero. Dixon, R. M. W. & Alexandra Aikhenvald (1997). "A Typology of Argument-Determined Constructions". In Bybee, Joan, John Haiman, & Sandra A. Thompson (eds.) ''Essays on Language Function and Language Type: Dedicated to T. Givón''. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 71–112. The impersonal passive deletes the subject of an intransitive verb. In place of the verb's subject, the construction instead may include a syntactic placeholder, also called a '' dummy''. This placeholder has neither thematic nor referential content. (A similar example is the word "there" in the English phrase "There are three books.") In some languages, the deleted argument can be reintroduced as an '' oblique argument'' or ''complement''. Test of unergative verbs In most languages that allow impersonal passives, only unergative verbs may undergo impersonal passivization. Unaccusativ ...
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