Impersonal Passive ‘Personalized’

Abstract

Within a specified sense of pragmatics, this article will discuss impersonal passive in (written) Arabic and its typological counterpart in English, a rather unique construction which subjectivizes the semantically vacuous nominal expletive to refer to the indefinite humanness of the real Agent (or its thematic proxy). It will show that there exist certain instantiations of the construction where the subjectivized category is not semantically vacuous but the real Agent (or its thematic proxy) still maintains reference to its indefinite humanness in particular, thus overlapping with what is misleadingly termed ‘personal passive’ in the literature. Hence, with respect to the logical value of transitivity underlying the central activity, the article will highlight two major sub-types of impersonal passive and their ‘personalized’ versions as a preliminary to further reconsideration of the entire terminological apparatus in this regard –the principal concern of a forthcoming article..