Passives and impersonals

Passive and impersonal constructions have a strikingly different status in current theoretical and descriptive studies. All formal approaches recognize passive constructions and provide some means of relating their properties to those of corresponding actives. Any framework that did not would be considered fundamentally deficient or incomplete. Many descriptive grammars likewise apply a broad notion of ‘passive’ to any alternation that involves subject suppression. In contrast, impersonal constructions often remain implicit in language descriptions, and are neglected altogether in theoretical work. This omission is not accidental, as most frameworks expressly exclude the possibility of subjectless constructions. hpsg is one of the few that appears relatively agnostic on this score. Nearly all other approaches incorporate some subject-legislating constraint, whether expressed as the ‘Extended Projection Principle’of Chomsky 1981, the ‘Final 1 Law’ of Perlmutter and Postal 1983b, or the ‘Subject Condition’ of Bresnan and Kanerva 1989. Taken together, the near-universal recognition of passives and the corresponding neglect of impersonals introduce a tacit descriptive bias in favour of passives. Constructions that occupy the communicative niche associated with the passive are often treated as passives, even when they differ from passives in formal respects that are noted in the traditional or specialist literature. This paper argues that the neglect of impersonal constructions has had two significant consequences. The first is a descriptive misanalysis of individual constructions, illustrated by the ‘passive’treatment of ‘impersonal voice’forms in Finno-Ugric, and ‘autonomous’forms in Celtic. The second consequence is an extended notion of ‘passive’ that subsumes formally distinct subconstructions and exhibits variation that confounds attempts to impose substantive constraints. The conclusions drawn from ‘impersonal passives’ in Balto-Slavic illustrate the theoretical effects of this misclassification. A passive analysis of synchronically impersonal forms in -no/-to in Ukrainian has fostered the belief that passive constructions may retain structural accusative objects (Sobin 1985). A similar misclassification of -ta forms in Lithuanian underlies claims that passives may be formed from what Perlmutter 1978 calls ‘initially unaccusative’ verbs (Timberlake 1982, Nerbonne 1982). Since these patterns violate various laws proposed within Relational Grammar (rg), they have been interpreted as refuting relational analyses of the passive. In response, a number of accounts, including Baker et al. 1989 and Bresnan and Kanerva 1989, introduce generalized mechanisms that admit, amongst other possibilities, passives of unaccusative verbs. Yet no account that sanctions an expanded class of ‘passive’ constructions provides any general strategy for excluding unaccusative passives in the many languages that