Agentivity in Human Impersonal Constructions in Polish and Russian

The six studies studies have shown that the constructions are differently sensitive to agent prominence. While the passive voice and the -no/-to construction in Polish show similar effects in showing more pronounced effects with respect to agent prominence, the reflexive and the active are not. The same applies to the 3pl impersonal in Russian.

This book presents a synchronic study on the applicability and the acceptability of the passive and three impersonal constructions in Polish (-no/-to, reflexive, and 3pl) and Russian (3pl construction) that were contrasted with a regular active construction. The constructions show different degrees of applicability with different verbs independent of the animacy of the demoted subject. The main idea pursued in this book is that the grammaticality of the relevant constructions depends on the degree of agentivity of the implicit subject entailed by the verb. For the description of the verb semantics Dowtys proto-role model (1991) is used, which operates by summing up the proto-agent, and the proto-patient entailments to determine how much agent-like or patient-like a semantic role is.

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