Es war einmal ein Subjekt

This article deals with the occurrence of es in the subject position in German. It explores the functions of es as the subject of impersonal verbs, impersonal copula constructions and impersonal passive constructions. Explanations are offered to its obligatory and facultative functions in different construction types. The final part of the paper explores through a pilot study the acceptability of es as an expletive element in sentences with two predicates and one subject. Two rules are given to explain the findings

From 3ptl-to passive : incipient, emergent and established passives

This paper explores, in some detail, 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

Otra interpretación de “hace” y “ha”

Hay una serie de construcciones en español que distintos investigadores colocan bajo la denominación de construcciones o frases u oraciones de tipo impersonal. Me refiero a aquellas en que intervienen los signos haber y hacer. El problema que nos planteamos en este artículo consiste en verificar si efectivamente las construcciones con haber y hacer encasilladas como impersonales lo son siempre, o, por el contrario, hay que replantear sobre nuevas bases semejante clasificación.There are a series of constructions in Spanish that different researchers placed under the denomination of constructions, or phrases, or sentences of impersonal type. I am referring to those involving the signs "hace" and "ha". The problem that we face in this article, consists in verifying whether the constructions with "hace" and "ha" are always impersonal one, or we need to rethink on new bases this classification.peerReviewe

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

Las construcciones impersonales con un complemento en dativo y otro en genitivo se documentan en griego en un número muy reducido de verbos que designan interés o necesidad. Aunque se trata de una construcción presente también en otras lenguas indoeuropeas antiguas, en griego se documenta a partir de fecha posthomérica. Las construcciones personales, más recientes en otras lenguas, se documentan en griego, sin embargo, ya desde Homero. El dativo de la construcción impersonal designa entidades humanas y, además, expresa el Experimentador y el tópico. Estas propiedades designativas, semánticas y pragmáticas, próximas a las del sujeto prototípico, permiten al dativo ciertos comportamientos sintácticos característicos del sujeto. Nos hallamos, pues, ante un semisujeto, es decir, ante un complemento verbal que, a pesar de su codificación gramatical, diferente de la del sujeto, presenta unas propiedades y unos comportamientos sintácticos próximos a los de este. El genitivo de la construcción impersonal objeto de estudio presenta también comportamientos sintácticos característicos del sujeto, si bien estos comportamientos solo coinciden parcialmente con los del dativo.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

Adjectives in TreeLex

International audienceThe paper presents an ongoing project on automatic extraction of subcategorization frames of French adjectives. The extraction method is guided by syntactic corpus annotations and heuristic rules. In particular, we use general linguistic knowledge to eliminate impersonal, comparative and certain adverbial constructions from the list of subcategorisation patterns