Impersonal construction

An impersonal construction is a clausal construction in which no subject is realized, or at least no referential subject.

Examples
The following examples are impersonal constructions from German:

Dancing is going on. (impersonal passive)

One wears white this summer. (construction with impersonal pronoun in subject position)

Japanese does not require an overt/dummy subject, as is demonstrated in this example:

We are closed on Sundays. (cited after Yamamoto 2006: 4)

Comments
In the recent linguistic literature, a clear distinction has been made between passives and impersonal constructions (cf. Blevins 2003, Yamamoto 2006).


 * "Whereas passivization detransitivizes a verb by deleting its logical subject, impersonalization preserves transitivity, and merely inhibits the syntactic realization of a surface subject." (Blevins 2003).

The non-realized subjects of impersonals are often interpreted as indefinite human agents, thus those constructions are often only possible with verbs which select a human agent. In languages which require an overt subject (i.e. languages not allowing pro-drop) an expletive subject is used.

Other constructions that have been called "impersonal" are:
 * constructions with an expletive subject (e.g. it is raining, Russian svetaet 'it dawns')
 * "subjectless" experiential constructions with the experiencer in a non-nominative case (e.g. Latin me pudet 'I am ashamed', German mich friert 'I am cold')

Synonym

 * subjectless construction

Other languages
French construction impersonnelle German unpersönliche Konstruktion