TY - JOUR
TI - The Impersonal Subject -N/T Construction in Polish and the Typology of Voice Heads
AU - Ruda, Marta
TI - The Impersonal Subject -N/T Construction in Polish and the Typology of Voice Heads
AB - The paper offers a novel analysis of the impersonal construction marked with -no/to in Polish. Contra previous accounts, the -no/to verbal morphology is decomposed into two morphemes, -n/t, realizing an impersonal active Voice head and –o, the default spell-out of unvalued agreement features of finite T. The analysis is embedded within a wider set of assumptions about the composition of the extended verbal projection in Polish, including a second active Voice head in addition to Voice found in personal structures. This suggests that the inventory of Voice heads in natural languages includes not only two non-active heads (i.e. passive and middle), but also two active Voice heads (i.e. personal and impersonal). The distributional and interpretational properties of the construction, including Case-related behaviour in secondary-predication contexts, suggest that the impersonal subject is best analysed as a minimal pronoun, whose Case feature is unvalued/absent in the narrow syntax.
VL - Volume 9 (2014)
IS - Vol. 9, Issue 4
PY - 2015
SN - 1732-8160
C1 - 2300-5920
SP - 203
EP - 243
UR - https://ejournals.eu/en/journal/studies-in-polish-linguistics/article/the-impersonal-subject-n-t-construction-in-polish-and-the-typology-of-voice-heads
KW - impersonals
KW - Polish -no/to construction
KW - Voice
KW - minimal pronoun
KW - extended verbal projection
KW - tense-aspect interaction