Mittepersonaalsete

Mittepersonaalsete is a term used in Estonian linguistics to refer to elements that are not marked for person or do not involve a personal agent. The form is the genitive plural of mittepersonaalne, an adjective meaning not personal or impersonal. In grammar, mittepersonaalsete describes phenomena where the participant expressed by the verb or construction is not a person, or where person is semantically irrelevant.

The concept is most often applied to impersonal constructions, where a statement is about a situation, a phenomenon, or an event rather than about an individual. It also covers non-personal nouns and adjectives used to describe states, weather, time, processes, or abstract relations. The label helps linguists distinguish between forms that encode person (subject or agent) and those that do not.

In descriptive grammar and language corpora, mittepersonaalsete appears in discussions of how certain verbs, constructions, or phrases function without a personal subject, as well as in analyses of how impersonal meaning is conveyed syntactically and semantically. The term is a technical label used primarily in scholarly contexts, and its English equivalents are typically described as impersonal or non-personal constructions.

Overall, mittepersonaalsete functions as a grammatical category for analyzing non-personal elements in Estonian syntax and semantics, aiding precise description of how language handles entities that are not persons.