Talk:Impersonal verb

Subject agreement and Esperanto

I've just removed an addition by Michael Hardy:

In Esperanto, verbs do not agree with subjects, so the few impersonal verbs cannot be said to behave in any way as if there were any kind of subject.

The reason: agreement is irrelevant to the matter, and the second part of the sentence may be misleading. In Mandarin nothing agrees with anything, and yet verbs have recognizable arguments (though the distinction may be more pragmatical than syntactical). Also, in Esperanto subjects are marked by position and by case (before the verb and no preposition or -n accusative mark, IIRC), so the subject is recognizable when there is one, and (correct me if I'm wrong) anything in subject position is obviously wrong when the verb is an impersonal one.

What MH may have meant is that an impersonal verb and a verb that is alone and doesn't have a subject agreement mark are indistinguishable. That's correct, but only regarding the actual verb word in that specific context. There are many intransitive verbs that can appear alone in a language like Esperanto, but they do have implicit subjects.

--Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 02:15, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

Merge with weather verb?

Should weather verb be merged into this article? --Jim Henry 02:30, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

I think so, yes. Ruakh 13:50, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

There is

Recently there is/are/etc. has been added to this article as an impersonal verb. There is a good argument to be made for this interpretation, but it's not the traditional interpretation, and an argument can be made going the other way as well. All in all, I don't think we can just say that there is is an impersonal verb without any comment or reference. Ruakh 19:40, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Mistake

"In terms of valency, impersonal verbs are avalent, meaning that they altogether lack semantic arguments"

Wrong (it might be true in English, I don't know, but not in Latin for example : cf. me pudet alicuius). Please see this. Fsojic (talk) 22:28, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Impersonal passive?

Shouldn't there be some mention in this article of the impersonal passive voice (as in Dutch, Er wordt geklopt = lit, "there became knocked" = "There was a knock [at the door].")—with a link to that article for fuller treatment? If not, why not? J. D. Crutchfield | Talk 16:23, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

except that 'er' is a pronoun for 'deur' which is masculine. Stjohn1970 (talk) 02:12, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

Russian impersonal adjunct example

The section "Impersonal verb in various languages" mentions that in some languages impersonal verbs will allow objects to appear as an instrumental adjunct, such as British English "It was pouring with rain."

It also gives the Russian example

 Весь декабрь лил дождь.

This is not an example of an instrumental adjunct. The object "дождь" (rain) here is syntactically the subject of the verb "лил" (poured). If "дождь" were an instrumental adjunct, it would be expressed as

 Весь декабрь лил дождём. *

which, as far as I can tell, is ungrammatical. Can we replace this example with a real one? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 221.215.1.253 (talk) 06:52, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

"(5) It is unclear why he cut the rope."

Is this really an impersonal verb phrase? I'm genuinely curious because I am trying to fully understand the concept of impersonal verbs, but to me this example doesn't fit in with the rest. Let me explain why! To preface, I'm not saying the entry / example is wrong, as I honestly don't know, but I am starting this discussion which aims to seek for clarification or ultimately arrive to the conclusion that it isn't an impersonal verb phrase.

Postcedents: "why he cut the rope" is a postcedent. In other words, there is still a reference which we could replace <it> with, unlike in the other four examples: "why he cut the rope is unclear" or "the reason why he cut the rope is unclear".

A few more comparable examples

• "it is beyond me how they lost" = "how they lost is beyond me".
• "it is unhealthy to smoke" = "smoking is unhealthy" (the morphology is different, nonetheless <it> clearly refers to <to smoke>, a postcedent).
• "man, it sucks that you didn't graduate" = "man, that you didn't graduate sucks", or we could paraphrase it to the more natural sounding "man, you not graduating sucks", but in any case, <it> still clearly refers to something: the idea of "you not graduating".
• "it isn't known where the treasure is hidden" = "where the treasure is hidden isn't known"

Yet on the other hand, there is no way that we could find a way to replace <it> in "it seems that there is no end to this", though we could in a sentence like, "it seems crazy that they lost" = "that they lost seems crazy" / "them losing seems crazy". I mean we could say, "there seems to be no end to this", but <there> clearly has no reference which we could replace it with either, as <there> can also function as a dummy subject. Thus, <seem> in example 4 to me seems impersonal as well, like the prior 3 examples, because <it> or <there> really don't refer to anything, yet example 5 doesn't, because <it> does refer to something, despite being stated before it. <it> is used as a place-holding dummy subject, but does that alone make it impersonal? It still refers to a postcedent.

Anyway, I hope to read a response soon!

@B23Rich This is WP:NOTAFORUM for discussion about impersonal verbs, but rather a page for suggesting improvements for the article. I agree that the section should be rewritten or modified to be more clear, and to cite reliable sources inline; feel free to jump in and make edits based on reliable journal articles. I don't have a personal opinion on whether "it is unclear" is the use of an impersonal verb; from Wikipedia's point of view it is an impersonal verb if and only if the cited sources judge it to be an impersonal verb. As always, parts of speech are fuzzy and debatable categories. The question is not simply whether the subject could be replaced by a referent, but the more difficult one of whether the language-processing parts of our brains act as though there is a referent when we compose or read the sentence. Rolf H Nelson (talk) 23:12, 24 March 2018 (UTC)

"monopersonal verbs"?

This term is so rare that it is perhaps not used by native speakers, but some linguists that are apparently not native English speakers seem to use it, and it was perhaps used by native English speakers in the past. I.e. Ngram Viewer finds absolutely no use in English, but Google Books finds some examples, e.g. this and this, and it's used once on Wikipedia (Alyutor language). --Espoo (talk) 12:04, 18 December 2019 (UTC)

Why it is raining is not nominative case

Because I think there is no object ☺️☺️ 103.240.99.61 (talk) 03:24, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

motive

It* was Danish linguist Otto Jespersen who, in 1924, published his work "The Philosophy of Grammar" where he brings up 'impersonal'. I would be surprised if Danish had an 'impersonal' aspect. And so did Jespersen overlook something? Namely, did he not make a connection between the similarity of the Dutch 'het' sounding a lot like 'it'? Could that phenomenon, a morphological one, (from 'het' to 'it') not be behind this? "het"is primarily used as the definite article for neuter nouns. The origin of "het" can be traced back to the Old Dutch word "thet," from Old High German "daz" or "thaz". In sum, "it" MUST relate (back) to SOMETHING. 'impersonal' is a fictive term used for something you can explain, but for which some feel they can conjure a thesis.

• here in my sentence I [will have]used 'it' to mean 'some rationale'.

Finally, who can explain what 'weather' is, or why the god of wind and rain (Indra) was cast out? Stjohn1970 (talk) 02:32, 14 August 2023 (UTC)

Why mention Welsh in the title and give examples in Spanish and Portuguese?

Why is:

”Verbs meaning existence may also be impersonal.”

followed by examples from ES an PT under a title referring to CY?Redav (talk) 10:03, 4 October 2023 (UTC)