Person matters in impersonality

The Basque impersonal is a detransitivized construction where the internal argument is the only overt argument and the external argument, although semantically present, does not have any morphological reflex. This article argues that, despite its intransitive shape, the impersonal involves a particu...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inSyntax (Oxford, England) Vol. 25; no. 2; pp. 147 - 187
Main Authors Berro, Ane, Odria, Ane, Fernández, Beatriz
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.06.2022
Subjects
Basque language
Morphology
Person
Phi features
Syntax
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:The Basque impersonal is a detransitivized construction where the internal argument is the only overt argument and the external argument, although semantically present, does not have any morphological reflex. This article argues that, despite its intransitive shape, the impersonal involves a particular kind of Voice projection that we term defective. For case and agreement, being defective means having no uninterpretable ϕ features and no Case to assign. However, a silent person pronoun is introduced in its specifier position, and thus, there are two arguments within VoiceP. The two arguments compete to value the ϕ features of the next functional head, namely T. With this analysis we account for the main properties of the impersonal, such as the syntactic activeness of the implicit external argument and the person constraint on the internal argument.
ISSN:1368-0005
1467-9612
DOI:10.1111/synt.12230