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.
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.
Impersonal Constructions in Polish and Russian (and other Slavic and Non-Slavic Languages) - Thematic roles and thematic role approaches - Manual for the diagnosis of agentivity features - Corpus study of the -no/-to and the reflexive arb of Polish intransitive and transitive verbs - Exploration and decomposition of the feature [ sentience] Exploration of the feature [ movement]
Maria Katarzyna Prenner studied Slavic Phililogy at the University of Cologne (Germany) and the University of Vienna (Austria). Currently she works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Justus-Liebig-University in Gießen (Germany). Her research interests include morphosyntactic variation in Slavic languages, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics and biscriptality in the Slavia.
