Impersonal passive voice
The impersonal passive voice is a verb voice that decreases the valency of an intransitive verb (which has valency one) to zero.: 77
| Transitivity and valency |
|---|
| Transitivity |
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Intransitive verb Transitive verb Ditransitive verb |
| Valence increasing |
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Causative Applicative Benefactive Dative shift |
| Valence decreasing |
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Passive Antipassive Impersonal passive |
| Reflexives and reciprocals |
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Reflexive pronoun Reflexive verb Reciprocal (grammar) Reciprocal pronoun |
| Linguistics portal |
The impersonal passive deletes the subject of an intransitive verb. In place of the verb's subject, the construction instead may include a syntactic placeholder, also called a dummy. This placeholder has neither thematic nor referential content. (A similar example is the word "there" in the English phrase "There are three books.")
In some languages, the deleted argument can be reintroduced as an oblique argument or complement.
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