The role of definiteness in the impersonal passives of Modern Irish: Towards an RRG characterisation

This paper is about the impersonal passive construction of which modern Irish, a VSO language, has two forms. The impersonal passive form occurs with all verbs of Irish, across all tenses, whether intransitive or transitive. In the second form, the impersonal passive form is to be found productively with the substantive verb (one of the two verbs of ‘to be’ in Irish) across all tenses. It does not, however, under any circumstances occur with the copula verb. Our view is that the impersonal passive construction has an indefinite actor at the level of the semantics and that the impersonal passive verb expresses this as a third person indefinite pronoun in the syntax via a synthetic post-verbal suffix rendered on the matrix verb. When considered in this way, the behaviour of the impersonal passive verb in the syntax is shown to be the same with respect to definite subject pronouns when they are expressed in a non-analytic manner, that is, in the synthetic form of the verb. There is some diachronic evidence in support of this. In this paper we examine these constructions. We argue that a characterisation in the RRG framework must allow for a verbal predicate sensitive to definiteness as a head features on nominals, and operate in a manner similar to agreement features. We posit definiteness as one of a number of binary head features and claim that these features are recognised by the verbal predicate at linking time such that the argument linking to direct object is ‘blocked from promotion’.