Say what yow list

Impersonal verbs in English

There are many grammatical features from Old English which were in flux during the Middle English period and eventually lost in modern English, and one such feature was the use of impersonal verbs.

Impersonal verbs are verbs whose semantic experiencers are rendered as objects, rather than subjects as we typically expect to see in modern English. The impersonal verb construction is typically “understood to be a construction that lacks a grammatical subject… It contains the semantic argument of ‘experiencer’ in the dative or accusative case; the argument of ‘cause’, if present, appears in the accusative, the genitive or as a prepositional object”^❦1 Fischer & Van Der Leek 1983, p 347. These impersonal verb constructions fell out of use due to the gradual erosion of the noun declension system of Old English — the impersonal construction relied on non-nominative cases to mark an experiencer “subject.” A rare survival of an impersonal verb construction into modern English is the frozen methinks, which in more idiomatically natural modern English means it seems to me. During the Middle English period, when noun cases were still on their way out, impersonal verbs could alternate between the impersonal construction and the experiencer-subject construction found in Modern English.

Impersonal verbs involve a “physical or mental/cognitive experience which involves a ‘goal’, in this case an animate ‘experiencer’, and a ‘source’, i.e. something from which the experience emanates or by which the experiencer is effected”^❦2 Fischer & Van Der Leek 1983, p 346. In Modern English, the animate experiencer tends to be a subject in the nominative case, whereas the source is typically a direct object or the object of a preposition. The impersonal construction, on the other hand, makes the experiencer into a direct or indirect object, or the object of a preposition. While subjects tend to carry a connotation of agency or volition, direct and indirect objects are more typically semantic patients or recipients of action. Moreover, verbs in impersonal constructions share “a sort of ‘immanent domain’ wherein the subject suffers or undergoes some physiological or psychological change,” and that, at least in Old English, there was “the marked character of a causative nature in many of these verbs: e.g., I fear (me fears) = I am afraid = I am frightened = something has caused me to become frightened”^❦3 Sabatini 1979, p 151. In an impersonal or non-subject experiencer construction, the perceiver is treated like an object, and perhaps therefore with less possibility for agency as one would conversely expect of a subject. This contrast in meaning expressed by switching between an impersonal and an experiencer-subject construction can actually be found as far back as Old English — Moon (2002) gives the following examples of viable Old English translations for “I pity the deed”^❦4 Moon 2002, p 106:

Translation (i) is truly impersonal, having no subject, with the cause of pity in the genitive case and the experiencer in the dative, while (ii) has the cause as the nominative subject, as we often see in the Middle English examples and in the impersonal constructions of Romance languages. Translation (iii) reflects the expected modern English experiencer-subject construction, but with the cause in the genitive rather than the direct object accusative case, as Old English verbs sometimes took genitive rather than accusative objects.

Interestingly, the non-nominative experiencers in Old and Middle English have been demonstrated to still function syntactically as subjects^❦5 Þ Eyþórsson & Barðdal 2005, p 843 (i.e. they are quirky subjects) — in other words, although they do not take the typical nominative case expected of the subject, they still fill the role of a syntactic pivot around which coordinate and subordinate clauses will hinge, just like more canonically nominative subjects.

Non-nominative quirky subjects lend to the experiencer maintaining a status as the focal point of the clause, while at the same time using the impersonal construction to add a nuance of non-agency to the experiencer. The importance of agency or volition in mental/cognitive verbs is a feature shared across many Indo-European languages, and may be an inheritence from a period in which the Proto-Indo-European language had a fluid-subject active-stative alignment*, which enabled switching the case of the subject of intransitive and stative verbs to express volition^❦6 Bauer 2000. Remnants of this may be found in the stative and middle voice usages of Romance and Slavic reflexives, Greek middle verbs, Latin deponent passive verbs, and in Germanic quirky subject and impersonal verbs.

While modern English only retains the impersonal construction in frozen forms like methinks or as you please, Middle English still had many examples of the impersonal. In Chaucer's poetry, for example, the verbs liken and listen (both meaning, transitiviely, ‘to please’) most often appear in impersonal constructions^❦7 Miura 2006, p 25 with the experiencer marked as an object, for example:

This impersonal construction could be mimicked in Modern English with a phrasing such as “[X] pleases [Y],” where the experiencer [Y] is rendered as an object, just like the experiencers in these examples of Chaucer. In Chaucer’s usage in this poem, “liking” is being construed more as an affliction or something one undergoes with minimal volition or agency. Further examination of Chaucer's usage of impersonal and non-impersonal constructions in his poetry suggests that he took advantage of the relatively fluid state of impersonal verbs in Middle English, and employed them strategically to add nuance to the agency or non-agency of experiencers.

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references

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bibliography

• Bauer, B 2000. Archaic Syntax in Indo-European: The Spread of Transitivity in Latin and French. de Gruyter
• Fischer, O & Van Der Leek, FC 1983. ‘The demise of the Old English impersonal construction.’ Journal of Linguistics 19,2, p 337-68
• Miura, A 2006. ‘The Impersonal Listen in Chaucer’s Works: Implications of Its Textual Distribution.’ Lexicon 36, p 24-40
• Moon, KH 2002. ‘Us thinketh hem wonder nyce and straunge: where form andmeaning collide.’ Lingua Humanitatis 2,1, p 93-127
• Sabatini, RN 1979. ’The Disappearance of the Impersonal Construction in English.’ The South Central Bulletin 39,4, p 151-3
• Þ Eyþórsson & Barðdal, J 2005. ‘Oblique Subjects: A Common Germanic Inheritance.’ Language 81,4, p 824-81

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philology