Passives and Impersonals

Passive and impersonal constructions provide distinct grammatical strategies for suppressing or downgrading a logical subject. Passives are syntactically detransitivized counterparts of initially unergative predicates in which the logical subject is realized as an oblique dependent, or remains unexpressed. Impersonals are active constructions in which the syntactic expression of the subject is inhibited. The two constructions thus achieve a similar communicative goal of reducing the prominence of the logical subject, and enhancing the prominence of the verb and remaining dependents. However, they use characteristically grammatical means to achieve this end.