The focus of this paper is a construction which is surprisingly rarely scrutinised: the impersonal passive of the intransitive. Although it sometimes receives a brief mention in discussions of the passive, and although the impersonal passive label is often wrongly given to morpholexical impersonal constructions, there are as yet no thorough analyses of the impersonal passive available for any l...

1. The impersonal passive In this paper I apply the phase-based model outlined in Chomsky 1998, 1999 to the pattern of impersonal passives in English and the Scandinavian languages, with supporting evidence drawn from French and Spanish. The basic observation is that the location of an ‘associate’ DP in impersonal passives varies cross-linguistically. The basic order can be taken to be that in ...

Impersonal pronouns are prototypically used in generic sentences to make generalizations about people. Yet they unlike bare plural people or indefinite singular a person that exhibit sensitivity first-person perspective. This relationship can be seen ( a) inferences of experience associated with use these pronouns, b) additional meaning components carried by impersonally personal involving pres...

Recognition of human activities, using smart phones and wearable devices, has attracted much attention recently. The machine learning (ML) approach to human activity recognition can broadly be classified into two categories: training an ML model on (i) an impersonal dataset or (ii) a personal dataset. Previous research shows that models learned from personal datasets can provide better activity...

Smartphones incorporate many diverse and powerful sensors, which creates exciting new opportunities for data mining and human-computer interaction. In this paper we show how standard classification algorithms can use labeled smartphone-based accelerometer data to identify the physical activity a user is performing. Our main focus is on evaluating the relative performance of impersonal and perso...