Impersonal verb
An
impersonal verb is a
verb that cannot take a true
subject, because it does not represent an action, occurrence, or state-of-being of any specific person, place, or thing. The term
weather verb is also sometimes used, since such weather-indicating verb as
to rain are usually impersonal.
In some
languages, such as
English,
French and
German, an impersonal verb always takes an impersonal "
dummy pronoun" (
it in English,
il in French,
es in German) as its syntactical subject:
It snowed yesterday.Il a neigé hier. (French)
Es schneite gestern. (German)
In some other languages (necessarily
null subject language and typically
pro-drop languages), such as
Portuguese,
Spanish,
Occitan,
Catalan and
Italian, an impersonal verb takes no
subject at all, but it is
conjugated in the
third-person singular, which is much as though it had a third-person, singular subject:
Nevó ayer. (Spanish)
Nevou ontem. (Portuguese)
In some languages, some verbs meaning
existence are also impersonal.
Há livros. /
Há um livro. (Portuguese:
There are books /
There is a book)
Hay libros. /
Hay un libro. (Spanish:
There are books /
There is a book)
In these languages, however, there may be personal verbs with more or less the same
meaning:
Existem livros. /
Existe um livro. (Portuguese:
There exist books /
There exists a book)
An impersonal verb is different from a
defective verb in that with an impersonal verb, only one possible syntactical subject is meaningful (either expressed or not), whereas with a defective verb, certain choices of subject might not grammatically possible, because the verb does not have a complete conjugation.
