2014 Volume 31 Issue 2 Pages 623-658
Ruth Möhlig-Falke’s The Early English Impersonal Construction (2012) is a thoroughgoing investigation of the Old English impersonal construction, from a syntactic perspective, within the framework of cognitive grammar and corpus-based data. In the present review, however, some oversight and problems requiring further investigations are identified including the following points: (1) polysemous situations and syntactic variations are often found with verbs used impersonally; (2) though the dative-accusative syncretism has already started, unambiguous case-endings are kept throughout the Old English period; (3) synonyms influence on each other syntactically; (4) when there is ambiguity, there is a need to go back to the manuscript(s); (5) many exceptions, if not too many, remain that must be explained in some way or the other. The best way to analyse the impersonal construction is still to be found.
