The Impersonal Subject - N/T Construction in Polish and the Typology of Voice Heads
The Impersonal Subject - N/T Construction in Polish and the Typology of Voice Heads

Summary/Abstract: The paper offers a novel analysis of the impersonal construction marked with -no/to in Polish. Contra previous accounts, the -no/to verbal morphology is decomposed into two morphemes, -n/t, realizing an impersonal active Voice head and –o, the default spell-out of unvalued agreement features of finite T. The analysis is embedded within a wider set of assumptions about the composition of the extended verbal projection in Polish, including a second active Voice head in addition to Voice found in personal structures. This suggests that the inventory of Voice heads in natural languages includes not only two non-active heads (i.e. passive and middle), but also two active Voice heads (i.e. personal and impersonal). The distributional and interpretational properties of the construction, including Case-related behaviour in secondary-predication contexts, suggest that the impersonal subject is best analysed as a minimal pronoun, whose Case feature is unvalued/absent in the narrow syntax.

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