ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF IMPERSONAL CONSTRUCTIONS

抄録

Impersonal constructions have been a topic of great interest to historical linguists. In this paper we will attempt to capture the fundamental properties of various kinds of impersonal constructions in terms of Case theory of Chomsky 1981. First we will discuss impersonal constructions containing only NP arguments and then turn to those with a complement clause. Lexical Case assignment and AGR deletion rule will be supposed to be involved in the derivation of these constructions.