Impersonal passive voice
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The impersonal passive voice is a verb voice that decreases the valency of an intransitive verb (which has valency one) to zero.
The impersonal passive deletes the subject of an intransitive verb. In place of the verb's subject, the construction instead may include a syntactic placeholder, also called a dummy. This placeholder has neither thematic nor referential content. (A similar example is the word "there" in the English phrase "There are three books.")
The deleted argument can be reintroduced as an oblique argument or complement.
[edit] Relation to Unergative Verbs
In most languages that allow impersonal passives, only unergative verbs may undergo impersonal passivization. Unaccusative verbs may not. The ability to undergo this transformation is a frequently used test to distinguish unergative and unaccusative verbs. In Turkish, for example, the verb çalışmak "to work" is unergative and may therefore be passivized:
- Burada çalış-ıl-ır.
- here work-PASS-PRESENT
- "Here it is worked."
The verb ölmek "to die", however, is unaccusative and may not be passivized:
- *Burada öl-ün-ür.
- here die-PASS-PRESENT
- "Here it is died."
[edit] Examples from German
German has an impersonal passive voice, as shown in the examples below:
Active Voice:
- Die Kinder schlafen.
- the children-NOM sleep
- "The children sleep."
Impersonal Passive Voice:
- Es wird geschlafen.
- DUMMY is slept
- (Literally) "It is slept."
In the latter example, the subject (Die Kinder, "the children") has been deleted, and in is place is the dummy es, loosely translated as "it".
The subject can be reintroduced using the preposition von, "by":
- Es wird von dem Kindern geschlafen.
- DUMMY is by the children-DAT slept
- (Literally) "It is slept by the children."
