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The impersonal passive voice is a verb voice that decreases the valency of an intransitive verb (which has valency one) to zero. [1]: 77 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 ...
Most impersonal constructions in Spanish involve using a special verb in [clarification needed] third-person defective verb with a direct object as its only argument or use of impersonal se (not to be confused with other uses of se). There are two main impersonal verbs in Spanish: haber (to have, to be (there is/are, there were)) and hacer (to do).
While in ordinary passive voice, the object of the action becomes the subject of the sentence, in impersonal passive voice, it remains the grammatical object. The subject can be replaced with an impersonal pronoun, as in French On lit le journal. or German Man liest die Zeitung. ("The newspaper is (being) read").
In English, intransitive verbs can be used in the passive voice when a prepositional phrase is included, as in, "The houses were lived in by millions of people." Some languages, such as Dutch , have an impersonal passive voice that lets an intransitive verb without a prepositional phrase be passive.
In linguistics, valency or valence is the number and type of arguments and complements controlled by a predicate, content verbs being typical predicates. Valency is related, though not identical, to subcategorization and transitivity, which count only object arguments – valency counts all arguments, including the subject.
The English passive voice typically involves forms of the verbs to be or to get followed by a passive participle as the subject complement—sometimes referred to as a passive verb. [ 1 ] English allows a number of additional passive constructions that are not possible in many other languages with analogous passive formations to the above.
That construction is called, in generative linguistics, subject-to-subject raising: the noun phrase (in the accusative) is detached from the infinitive and is raised as the nominative subject of the matrix passive verb: Dicitur [Homerum caecum fuisse]. Impersonal construction: the infinitival clause serves as the subject of the verb dicitur.
Impersonal passive voice, a verb voice that decreases the valency of an intransitive verb to zero; Impersonal verb, a verb that cannot take a true subject; Impersonal (grammar), a grammatical gender in languages such as Sumerian and Slavic languages; Impersonal pronoun, a descriptor of a pronoun set, referred as one/one's/oneself in English