Features the contributions that deal with various types of impersonality, namely constructions featuring nonagentive subjects, including those with experiential predicates, presentational constructions with a notional subject deficient in topicality, and constructions with a notional subject lacking in referential properties.

This volume offers a much needed typological perspective on impersonal constructions, which are here viewed broadly as constructions lacking a referential subject. The contributions to this volume deal with all types of impersonality, namely constructions featuring nonagentive subjects, including those with experiential predicates (A-impersonals), presentational constructions with a notional subject deficient in topicality (T-impersonals), and constructions with a notional subject lacking in referential properties (R-impersonals), i.e. both meteo-constructions and man-constructions. The typological discussion benefits from a good coverage of impersonality in European languages, but also includes considerations of several African, American, South-East Asian, Australian, and Oceanic languages. The variation in the cross-linguistic realization of impersonality and the diachronic pathways leading to and from impersonality documented in this volume point to a novel perspective on impersonals as transitional structures or an intermediate stage of a more basic diachronic change be it from transitive to intransitive, or from active to passive, or participant-to event-centered construction.

This book is a research monograph on impersonal si constructions (ISC) in Italian within the Minimalist program framework. The book offers a new point of view on ISCs, providing a new set of crucial data that were previously unknown, and pointing out many characteristics of ISCs that were overlooked before. It results in the introduction of additional means of syntactic analysis at the edge between narrow syntax and pragmatics.

"The first international conference was held at Chiba University in 1-3 September 2005, the second one at Nagoya University in 7-9 September 2007, and the third one at Hiroshima University in 28-30 August 2009"--P. [v].

The Early English Impersonal Construction aims to demonstrate that an understanding of the functional and semantic aspects of impersonal verbs in Old and Middle English can shed light on questions that remain about these verbs today. The impersonal construction has been a topic of extensive research for over a hundred years. But three quandaries-their seemingly unsystematic development, the gradual loss of impersonal uses, and the difficulty of aligning this with structural changes in early English-have made explanations for their development unsatisfactory. Möhlig-Falke offers a detailed analysis of impersonal verbs within the framework of cognitive and constructional grammar. She focuses on the loss of the impersonal construction as a consequence of a redefinition of the grammatical categories of subject and object, and describes the diachronic development of impersonal verbs as a result of the complex interaction of verbal and constructional meaning. Her research comprises all verbs which are recorded in impersonal use in Old and Middle English, and takes account of their full range of syntactic uses. It is thus the most comprehensive investigation of the impersonal construction in early English available to date.

Comprising a selection of papers presented at the Ninth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics held in Poznan in August 1996, this volume contains 28 contributions addressing a range of topics, but with an emphasis on morphological and syntactical studies on word-formation, modality and negation, and clause structure in the history of the English language. A more theoretically-oriented strain is represented by contributions treating grammaticalization or lexical diffusion in language change. There are also contributions addressing the historiography of historical linguistics including discussion of past grammarians such as Buchanan or Huish, as well as phonological studies and discussion of the development of Early Modern English. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

With a careful use of dictionary materials and modern linguistic approaches, this book investigates why some Middle English verbs of emotion are attested in impersonal constructions while others are not, even though they look almost synonymous. A range of factors are identified that affected their behaviour.