The Basque impersonal is a detransitivized construction where the internal argument only overt and external argument, although semantically present, does not have any morphological reflex. This article argues that, despite its intransitive shape, involves particular kind of Voice projection that we term defective. For case agreement, being defective means having no uninterpretable ϕ features Ca...

Harsanyi defends utilitarianism by means of an axiomatic proof and by what he calls the ‘equiprobability model’. Both justifications of utilitarianism aim to show that utilitarian ethics can be derived from Bayesian rationality and some weak moral constraints on the reasoning of rational agents. I argue that, from the perspective of Bayesian agents, one of these constraints, the impersonality c...

nonnative english-speaking scholars have often been reported to be at a disadvantage vis-à-vis their english native counterparts when it comes to writing a publishable research article (ra). when they submit their manuscripts to english-language journals, they sometimes receive comments criticizing their faulty english. one area of difficulty for these authors is the grammaticalization of neutr...

The term “bureaucracy” has never been so precisely defined than in the writings of Max Weber. Such precision results in a useful and enduring conceptualization of the term. This paper examines four essential characteristics of Weber’s ideal type bureaucracy; defining them and their technical advantages in the context of certain overarching sociological trends. These trends are impersonality, ef...