Impersonal predications are often viewed as structures expressing either agent defocusing, or lack of canonical subject properties. The study of one type of prototypical impersonal predication, meteorological predicates, in various Afroasiatic branches suggests that the subject or agent may not be centrally associated to the notion of impersonal. Rather, defocussing or backgrounding can concern either the entity or the event, resulting not only in subjectless structures and non-canonical subjects, but also in verbless structures and non-canonical predicates. What unifies those structures, rather than lack of canonical subjecthood or agent defocusing, is theticity, which may also be at play in other impersonal types than meteorological predicates.
Keywords: impersonal; Afroasiatic; theticity; meteorological predications; weather verbs
2021. From language to meteorology: kinesis in weather events and weather verbs across Sinitic languages. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 8:1
Andrason, Alexander
2019. Weather in Polish: A Contribution to the Typology of Meteorological Constructions. Studia Linguistica 73:1 ► pp. 66 ff.
Eriksen, Pål K., Seppo Kittilä & Leena Kolehmainen
2012. Weather and Language. Language and Linguistics Compass 6:6 ► pp. 383 ff.
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