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.
Read more about Impersonal Passive Voice: Test of Unergative Verbs, German, Venetian
Famous quotes containing the words impersonal, passive and/or voice:
“My image is a statement of the symbols of the harsh, impersonal products and brash materialistic objects on which America is built today. It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, the practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us.”
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