A note on “impersonal constructions”
We have noted several times that sentences (19a) and (20a) in Existential and possessive clauses are very similar in structure. However, there is an important difference between the two sentences as well. In both sentences, the existential predicate may is followed by a caseless NP complement. In the possessive clause (20a), the other NP (the possessor) is marked for nominative case, indicating that it is the subject. But there is no nominative NP in (19a); this sentence appears to lack a subject. Various syntactic tests confirm that sentences like (19a) and (19b) have no grammatical subject. This fact is not surprising: indefinite existentials in most languages are either subjectless or involve dummy subjects, like the there in the English translations of (19a) and (19b).1
Sentences that contain no subject are referred to as IMPERSONAL CONSTRUCTIONS. However, we must distinguish between true impersonal constructions and clauses in which the subject is simply not expressed by a distinct word or phrase. For example, in many languages which have a fully developed system of subject–verb agreement, subject pronouns may be optional or used only for special emphasis (recall our discussion of “pro drop”). As another example, the subject is usually not expressed in imperative sentences in English (and in many other languages), although it is “understood” to be present. Neither of these examples counts as a true impersonal construction.
Impersonal constructions are frequently used for METEOROLOGICAL clauses like the Tagalog examples in (32–33). The predicates in such clauses are sometimes called “weather verbs,” but they need not be verbs at all. The clauses in (32a) and (33a–c) all have verbal predicates, as indicated by their morphological structure, but the predicate in (32b) is an adjective.
Notice that the English translations of the examples in (19), (32), and (33) all contain a DUMMY subject, it or there. A dummy is an element which has no semantic content but simply occupies the subject position. Dummies often have the form of a pronoun, but they do not actually refer to anything. Some German examples of impersonal constructions containing the dummy subject es ‘it’ are given below. Example (34c) is a typical meteorological clause, while (34d) is an indefinite existential.
1. See Clark (1970); Schachter (1977). Definite existential clauses (e.g. God exists) often contain a normal intransitive verb (e.g. exist) which takes a normal subject NP. In languages which lack this kind of verb, it can be quite difficult to translate such sentences.
