impersonnels

Impersonnels, in linguistics, refers to sentences or verb forms that do not have a definite subject that can be identified in discourse. These constructions often use a dummy or expletive subject in the surface form, or they may be intrinsically unmarked for person. Impersonal forms are common in describing weather, existential statements, general truths, or phenomena that are not attributed to a specific agent.

Across languages, impersonnels appear in several patterns. In English, weather expressions such as “It is raining” or “There is a problem” use a dummy subject (it or there). In Spanish, verbs like llueve or nieva are inherently impersonal, describing weather without a personal subject, while hay expresses existence in an impersonal way. French commonly employs il with weather or formal expressions, as in il pleut or il faut partir, where il functions as a dummy subject. Finnish and other Uralic languages often have genuine impersonal verbs like sataa, meaning “it rains,” which do not take a personal subject.

Functionally, impersonnels are used to present situations as universally or nondifferently experienced by speakers, to foreground phenomena rather than agents, and to structure discourse around weather, time, or generalized statements. They complicate the notion of subjecthood by showing that sentence meaning can be independent of a referential agent.

Typologically, impersonnels contrast with personal constructions and passive or impersonal-passive forms found in some languages. They illustrate how different languages handle subject expression, agency, and distribution of semantic roles, contributing to broader accounts of syntax, morphosyntax, and information structure.