Talk:Impersonal verb

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[edit] Subject agreement and Esperanto

I've just removed an addition by Michael Hardy:

In Esperanto, verbs do not agree with subjects, so the few impersonal verbs cannot be said to behave in any way as if there were any kind of subject.

The reason: agreement is irrelevant to the matter, and the second part of the sentence may be misleading. In Mandarin nothing agrees with anything, and yet verbs have recognizable arguments (though the distinction may be more pragmatical than syntactical). Also, in Esperanto subjects are marked by position and by case (before the verb and no preposition or -n accusative mark, IIRC), so the subject is recognizable when there is one, and (correct me if I'm wrong) anything in subject position is obviously wrong when the verb is an impersonal one.

What MH may have meant is that an impersonal verb and a verb that is alone and doesn't have a subject agreement mark are indistinguishable. That's correct, but only regarding the actual verb word in that specific context. There are many intransitive verbs that can appear alone in a language like Esperanto, but they do have implicit subjects.

--Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 02:15, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Merge with weather verb?

Should weather verb be merged into this article? --Jim Henry 02:30, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

I think so, yes. Ruakh 13:50, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] There is

Recently there is/are/etc. has been added to this article as an impersonal verb. There is a good argument to be made for this interpretation, but it's not the traditional interpretation, and an argument can be made going the other way as well. All in all, I don't think we can just say that there is is an impersonal verb without any comment or reference. Ruakh 19:40, 18 October 2006 (UTC)