Basque impersonals in comparison

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dc.contributor.authorFernández Fernández, Beatriz
dc.contributor.authorBerro Urrizelki, Ane
dc.date.accessioned2025-05-08T13:13:05Z
dc.date.available2025-05-08T13:13:05Z
dc.date.issued2022
dc.date.updated2025-05-08T13:13:05Z
dc.description.abstractThe Basque impersonal is a detransitivized construction that resembles middles, passives and impersonals. In this construction, the thematic object is the grammatical subject, which bears absolutive case and triggers absolutive agreement, and the auxiliary selected is izan ‘be’. At the same time, there is an implicit agent that is syntactically active even though it is not realized as an ergative argument with corresponding ergative agreement. In this article, we compare the Basque impersonal with the middle, the passive of languages like English, and subject-suppressing impersonals (as in Polish), and we show that it is more similar to the passive and subject-suppressing impersonals, given that (i) in the Basque impersonal, the event is instantiated, (ii) it can be used with more predicate classes, and (iii) it allows dative-marked second objects, among other properties. Similarly, like in English-type passives and subject-suppressing impersonals, the implicit agent of the Basque impersonal is syntactically active, as it can license agent-oriented modifiers and control adjunct purpose clauses. Nevertheless, there are other properties in which these constructions differ; for instance, the implicit agent must be interpreted as human, unlike in passives, and the grammatical subject cannot be other than 3rd person, something attested neither in passives nor in subject-suppressing impersonals. In light of this distribution, we consider the Basque impersonal to be located somewhere in between middles, passives and subject-suppressing impersonals as far as its syntactic properties are concerneden
dc.description.sponsorshipThe research was financially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities’ research project PGC2018-096380-B-I00; from the Basque Government’s research project IT1169, and from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche’s ANR-17-CE27-0011-BIM research projecten
dc.identifier.citationFernández, B., & Berro, A. (2022). Basque impersonals in comparison. Linguistics, 60(4), 1039-1101. https://doi.org/10.1515/LING-2020-0057
dc.identifier.doi10.1515/LING-2020-0057
dc.identifier.issn0024-3949
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14454/2693
dc.language.isoeng
dc.publisherDe Gruyter Mouton
dc.rights© 2021 Beatriz Fernández and Ane Berro, published by De Gruyter
dc.subject.otherBasque
dc.subject.otherCausative alternation
dc.subject.otherImpersonal
dc.subject.otherMiddle
dc.subject.otherPassive
dc.titleBasque impersonals in comparisonen
dc.typejournal article
dcterms.accessRightsopen access
oaire.citation.endPage1101
oaire.citation.issue4
oaire.citation.startPage1039
oaire.citation.titleLinguistics
oaire.citation.volume60
oaire.licenseConditionhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
oaire.versionVoR
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