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This bulky chapter is devoted to the examination of Late Medieval Greek (11th–15th c. AD), the first period after late antiquity which provides us with material in a “vernacular” variety of Greek. The investigation, based on both literary and non‐literary sources, gives new insights into a great variety of issues, such as the semantic development of the μέλλω AVC—illustrated here for the first time. The much discussed and debated “θέ νά” construction is investigated at length, and a new account of its development is proposed, partly based on language contact between Greek‐ and Romance‐speaking populations, a largely unexplored issue.

This chapter presents a detailed analysis of the various impersonal patterns found with Old English (OE) verbs to bring out the functional properties of the OE impersonal construction. The investigation of the frequencies of impersonal compared with alternative syntactic uses shows that both in terms of type and token frequencies the verbs of emotion show the highest proportions of impersonal use; verbs of physical sensation, cognition, existential experience, and appropriateness ranking in the middle; and verbs of nonavailability, benefaction, and motion being rather marginally found in impersonal uses. There is, however, a considerable amount of lexical variation within the conceptual domains, so that these observations point only to tendencies.

The morphosyntactic analysis of the verbs that were capable of impersonal use in Old English (OE) was undertaken with the aim of determining the role that the impersonal construction had in the OE grammatical system, its function, and use. This chapter places the findings for OE into the context of the further diachronic development of impersonal verbs and the impersonal construction in Middle English (ME) and Early Modern English (EModE). Since a corpus study of ME and EModE is outside the scope of the present investigation, all statements made here either rely on the evidence provided by the Middle English Dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary online resources or on secondary literature. The material is preselected for the purpose of pointing out tendencies in the diachronic development of individual verbs and their range of syntactic uses, such as the loss of impersonal uses and the development of syntactic alternatives.

This chapter summarizes and concludes the discussion, and provides some considerations for future research. Working in a cognitive-functional framework, this study has presented an analysis of the impersonal verbs and the impersonal construction in early English that has focused on semantic and discourse-pragmatic factors and on the interaction among verbal, grammatical, and constructional meaning. By focusing on the semantic and discourse-pragmatic properties of the impersonal construction and on the interaction among verbal, grammatical, and constructional meaning, the reasons for the loss of the impersonal construction could be reassessed, pointing to the semantic and discourse-pragmatic motivations for its loss as a consequence of the drastic grammatical changes that affected the expression of transitive relations in the course of Middle English.

This chapter presents the results of the semantic analysis of the verbs capable of impersonal use in Old English (OE). The semantic analysis of the verb lexemes is the first step in the investigation of how verb meaning and constructional meaning interacted in OE to determine the function and role of the impersonal construction in the OE system of transitivity. The semantic characterizations offered for the individual verbs comprise the identification of the conceptual domains to which the individual verbs belong, the nature of the States of Affairs denoted by the verbs (i.e., their process type according to the properties of dynamicity, control, relationality, and causation), and their semantic frames in terms of profiled and unprofiled participant roles. This semantic analysis is based on the occurrences of the respective verbs in both personal (in)transitive and impersonal patterns, with personal (in)transitive use being considered to be the more basic and neutral sentence structure. The examples used for the illustration of verb senses in this chapter are accordingly not restricted to impersonal uses.

The first chapter provides a careful examination of the overall research context, with special emphasis on different syntactic-semantic definitions and classifications of ‘impersonal constructions’ and ‘impersonal verbs’ in the history of English, and introduces the question to be tackled in the book: why some verbs occurred in impersonal constructions while their apparent near-synonyms did not. The period of investigation is set to Middle English, which has received less attention in previous studies than Old English. A proposal is also made to adopt insights from the literature of psych-verbs in modern languages, which are closely related to impersonal verbs of emotion but have not been discussed together so far. The chapter ends with an overview of the remaining five chapters of the book.

The distinction between coordination and subordination is not clear-cut. The essence of coordination is the mental juxtaposition of structures construed as parallel and co-equal. Subordination has a number of dimensions, including form, the participation of one clause in the relationship profiled by another, and a clause's profile being overridden at the composite structure level. Constituency and profiling are often flexible, depending on factors like the size of clauses and their discourse function. The traditional division into adverbial, relative, and complement clauses is based primarily on how clauses are connected with one another. To the extent that these distinctions hold, they are based on semantic function rather than specific structural configurations. In the case of complements, the classic distinction between control and raising constructions is non-fundamental, the latter being just a special case of the former. Finite and nonfinite complements differ not just in form but in meaning and typical function. Predicates taking finite complements pertain to the epistemic status of propositions; those taking nonfinite complements pertain to the realization of occurrences. Complementation involves multiple conceptualizers and levels of conception. Different conceptualizers apprehend the same proposition each from their own perspective, assessing it with respect to their own conception of reality. Complement-taking predicates refer to different phases of this assessment. Impersonal constructions invoke a conceptualizer and the relevant scope of awareness in generalized fashion, suggesting that anyone would make the assessment under the circumstances.

To be able to determine the meaning and communicative function of the Old English (OE) impersonal construction, it is necessary to investigate it within the context of the OE grammatical system. This chapter focuses on the formal and functional properties of the aspects of OE grammar that play a role for the functionality of the OE impersonal construction. These are the OE means of expressing transitive relations, the nominal case categories, word order, the categories of subject and object, and their relationship to the discourse-pragmatic notion of topic.

This chapter turns to the structure of atelic events, focusing especially on the structure of atelic transitives. Topics discussed include atelic transitives and partitive case, and the behaviour of impersonal constructions.

In order to account for morphosyntactic microvariation, an approach based on silent elements provides an alternative (one that is more tightly tied to other aspects of syntax) to an approach based on syncretism: languages are not more or less syncretic, they just happen to have a certain distribution of empty morphemes. This chapter analyses cases of 3rd person clitics in French and Italian (on, ci), which, in addition to their impersonal use, are also used as 1st person plural pronouns. It proposes that these impersonal pronouns do not convey 1st person plural, but rather a silent WE pronoun present in the syntax does. The chapter analyzes which element (WE o impersonal clitic) is responsible for a variety of syntactic phenomena.

It has been reported that all the languages with the dative subject construction (DSC) always allow the null subject of a tensed clause, but all the languages with the null-subject construction do not necessarily allow the DSC. This chapter accordingly explores what differentiates the null-subject languages without the DSC from the ones with the DSC. Ura attempts to solve the question through analyzing the impersonal construction in Japanese and comparing it with the one found in Malayalam and Kannada. In the course of the investigation, a theory concerning inherent Case and its relevance to θ-assignment at LF is developed and elaborated significantly.

This chapter explores argument structure and its relation to syntax, particularly concentrating on its role in determining the grammatical functions of the semantic arguments of a predicate. The chapter examines different views of the representation and content of argument structure, and outlines the theory of the relation between thematic roles and grammatical functions. The first five sections explore issues relating to the theory of argument structure, including grammatical function alternations (Section 9.3) and argument selection and classification (Sections 9.4 and 9.5). The next four sections focus on the analysis of some important phenomena: the active/passive alternation (Section 9.6), impersonal predication (Section 9.7), locative inversion (Section 9.8), and complex predicates (Section 9.9). Further issues relating to grammatical functions and argument structure, including gradient distinctions and optionality, are considered in Section 9.10.

This chapter provides an overview of the uses of dative case in constructions other than dative external possessors, such as ‘ethical’ datives and dative objects of transitive and ditransitive verbs. Constructions traditionally analysed as ‘impersonal’ as well as constructions with copulas that use dative case present particular challenges of analysis, as do the dative complements of adjectives and nouns. While this study focuses on attributive possession, the use of dative case in predicative discussion is discussed in this chapter. In addition to delimiting the scope of the present investigation, the chapter provides background for the discussion in Chapter 7 of the relationship between the loss of functions of the dative case generally and the loss of dative external possessors in Middle English.