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In linguistics, an impersonal verb is one that has no determinate subject. For example, in the sentence "It rains", rain is an impersonal verb and the pronoun it corresponds to an exophoric referrent. In many languages the verb takes a third person singular inflection and often appears with an expletive subject.
Intransitive and transitive verbs are the most common, but the impersonal and objective verbs are somewhat different from the norm. In the objective, the verb takes an object but no subject; the nonreferent subject in some uses may be marked in the verb by an incorporated dummy pronoun similar to that used with the English weather verbs.
Verbs in the Finnic languages, such as Finnish and Estonian, have an impersonal voice, often simply called the passive (Finnish: passiivi, Estonian: umbisikuline tegumood), which omits the subject and retains the grammatical role of the object.
Impersonal passive voice, a verb voice that decreases the valency of an intransitive verb to zero; Impersonal verb, a verb that cannot take a true subject; Impersonal (grammar), a grammatical gender in languages such as Sumerian and Slavic languages; Impersonal pronoun, a descriptor of a pronoun set, referred as one/one's/oneself in English
Impersonal verbs such as to rain and to snow share some characteristics with the defective verbs in that forms such as I rain or they snow are not often found; however, the crucial distinction is that impersonal verbs are "missing" certain forms for semantic reasons—in other words, the forms themselves exist and the verb is capable of being ...
For example, in Dutch and Turkish, unergative verbs can be used in impersonal passive constructions, but unaccusative verbs cannot. [11] In the following example from Dutch, the verb is unergative, describing a voluntary action, and can be made passive: Er wordt hier veel geskied. "A lot of skiing is done here." (lit. "it is skied much here")
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Impersonal verbs are those lacking a person. In English impersonal verbs are usually used with the neuter pronoun "it" (as in "It seems," or "it is raining"). Latin uses the third person singular. These verbs lack a fourth principal part. A few examples are: pluit, pluere, plūvit/pluit – to rain (it rains) ningit, ningere, ninxit – to snow ...