Non-nominative arguments, active impersonals, and control in Latin

Abstract

Abstract The continuum of control plays a crucial role in the marking of transitivity in Latin, witnessed also by the alternation between the personal and impersonal encoding of eventualities. The present study investigates argument marking with some ‘impersonal’ verbs. These patterns reflect the crystallisation of a seemingly widespread construction in the early stages of the language, probably of Indo-European inheritance, the use of the third-person singular active with an accusative/oblique argument to denote the spontaneous manifestation of an eventuality and the lack of control of the A/S argument, a pattern competing with the passive form for some verbs in this domain. These impersonal constructions in Latin point to the existence of a dependent-marked, agentive-coding subsystem, similar to analogous constructions in languages with semantic alignment. This evidence suggests that Latin is a language with a syntactically based (nominative–accusative) and (dependent-marked) semantically based subsystems of alignment, sensitive to the notion of control.

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