Animacy and telicity: Semantic constraints on impersonal passives

This paper discusses the semantic constraints on impersonal passives in several languages, including German and Dutch. Corpus data support earlier assumptions that the situation denoted by impersonal passives is a homogeneous (e.g. atelic) event. Telic (or unaccusative) verb lexemes can be used in the impersonal passive if they are forced into event-structural homogeneity. I will attempt to derive this event-structural restriction from the referential demotion of the subject argument. In this view, the telicity restriction is not a strict independent constraint but rather an epiphenomenon of the referential non-individuation of the argument undergoing a change of state. Another widely acknowledged claim is that impersonal passives in some languages including German, Dutch, and Icelandic are restricted to human (or animate) agents. I will show that this condition turns out to be too restrictive for Dutch and German, once real discourse data are considered. In order to capture the cross-linguistic variation, I will draw upon notions related to proto-agentivity instead of animacy. In my analysis, both constraints on impersonal passives are tied to the meaning of the demoted argument. The event-structural telicity restriction is a consequence of its demoted referential properties, animacy is an effect of its proto-agent properties.