Qwynegold wrote: ↑Sun Apr 19, 2020 1:17 pm
Does anyone have examples of zero-valent verbs that aren't precipitation verbs? (For this purpose I'll count verbs that only take dummy pronouns as zero-valent.) I only have two examples, from Finnish and Swedish.
Latin impersonal verbs of feeling (normally in the 3rd person singular) are nice examples. There's not many of them though, this might be an exhaustive inventory:
Pudet. 'People around are feeling ashamed.'
Piget. '...feeling disgusted.'
Taedet. '...feeling tired (or angry/annoyed, frustrated).'
Pertaedet. '....feeling very tired.'
Miseret. '...feeling pity.'
Paenitet. '...feeling sorry, or feeling angry/annoyed.'
If you want to add the specific person experiencing the feeling, you add them as the accusative direct object. For the thing they're feeling ashamed/disgusted/tired/etc. about, you add a genitive verbal object. When the person is not stated, it tends to be implied that the person experiencing the feeling is "I" or "we".
These verbs really do not take any nominative subject under normal circumstances. Very occasionally, they're attested with the experiencer as the nominative subject with an agreeing verb (ego paeniteō, tū paenitēs...), but this is uncommon.
Also, if you don't mind getting into syntax and possibly involving multiple words, then plenty of languages can use passives and non-finite forms (infinitives, gerunds) to express impersonal notions. Like Latin and its use of the 3SG passive as an impersonal: currendum est 'people around or somebody around should run', egētur 'there is a lack of (many) things', or dīcitur 'it is said (that blah blah...)'; these are all morphological or morphosyntactic passives. And look at English infinitives, to treat a verb phrase as a noun phrase, as in "to live is to risk it all / to err / to suffer". And same goes for ing-forms, as in "laughing makes living easier". The English impersonal construction of using the existential "there be" is interesting in its own right: "there is too much chatting in here", "there's haunting at that house" (even if the latter doesn't sound very idiomatic).
In Spanish you can use the 3SG form with a reflexive pronoun, or more colloquially the bare 3PL form, to express about any impersonal you want while implying some vague type of a human subject.
Aquí se pinta (or 3PL
aquí pintan) 'people in general paint stuff in here',
en esa empresa se corre (or
en esa empresa corren) lit. "at that company people in general run" (meaning 'people there are always in a haste),
andan hablando lit. "people in general are going around while talking" (meaning 'people have been exchanging rumours').
(I think modern syntacticians would tend to assume the colloquial bare 3PL has an underlying
las personas 'the persons/people', but I think that'd be foolish (although typical of them, trying to give a subject to everything, apparently because of English...).
Las personas is too marked as [+formal] for colloquial Spanish. In colloquial we say
la gente instead, but that's a singular noun phrase and can't be used with 3PL.)
This Spanish construction with the refl. pron. is kind of interesting because it changes the interpretation of verbs that are normally true semantic reflexives with a reflexive pronoun, turning them into non-reflexive semantic transitives. If
aquí se mata has a dropped subject, it means 'he/she kills himself/herself here' (commits suicide), but in the impersonal interpretation, it means 'people kill other people here' (no suicide at all). Same goes for verbs that are normally used in the plural with a reflexive pronoun to create a reciprocal:
aquí se abraza 'people in general hug each other here' (cf.
se abrazan 'they (=some specific people) hug each other').
I can't use this construction to imply inanimate subjects though, and I could only use it for animals at a stretch. For inanimates, I need to say a noun phrase, and then the verb is not zero-valent anymore:
en este cuarto se caen las cosas 'in this room,
stuff falls down'.
