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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 corresponds to an exophoric referrent. In many languages the verb takes a third person singular inflection and often appears with an expletive subject.
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 ...
A sentence may lack a determinate subject, then it is called מִשְפָּט סְתָמִי /miʃˈpat staˈmi/, an indefinite or impersonal sentence. These are used in order to put emphasis on the action, and not on the agent of the action. Usually the verb is of the 3rd person plural form.
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").
One of the most common uses of dummy pronouns is with weather verbs, such as in the phrases "it is snowing" or "it is hot."[11]In these sentences, the verb to rain is usually considered semantically impersonal, even though it appears as syntactically intransitive; in this view, the required it in "it is snowing" is to be considered a dummy word.
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
Russian is a null-subject language – it allows constructing sentences without subject (Russian: безличные предложения). Some of them are claimed to not be impersonal, but to have oblique subject. One possible classification of such sentences distinguishes: [28]
The subject "(s)he" of the second sentence is only implied in Italian. English and French, on the other hand, require an explicit subject in this sentence.. Null-subject languages include Arabic, most Romance languages, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, the Indo-Aryan languages, Japanese, Korean, Persian, the Slavic languages, Tamil, and the Turkic languages.