Sank's Glossary of Linguistics 
 Imp-Imz

IMPERFECTIVE ASPECT

  1. (Grammar) Abbreviated NPFV, IPFV, or more ambiguously IMPV. A grammatical aspect used to describe ongoing, habitual, repeated, or similar semantic roles, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future. Although many languages have a general imperfective, others have distinct aspects for one or more of its various roles, such as progressive, habitual, and iterative aspects. The imperfective contrasts with the perfective aspect, which is used to describe actions viewed as a complete whole. | Wikipedia, 2025
  2. (Grammar) A term used in the analysis of aspect, referring to those forms of the verb which mark the way in which the internal time structure of a situation is viewed. Imperfective forms (or imperfectives) contrast with perfective forms, where the situation is seen as a whole, regardless of the time contrasts it may contain. The contrast is well recognized in the grammar of Slavic languages. | David Crystal, 2008

IMPERSONAL CONSTRUCTION

  1. (Grammar) A clausal construction in which no subject is realized, or at least no referential subject.
     In German:

    1. Impersonal Passive
      Es
      EXPLETIVE
      wird
      AUX
      getanzt.
      dance.PARTICIPLE
      'Dancing is going on.'
    2. Construction with Impersonal Pronoun in Subject Position
      Man
      one
      trägt
      wear.3SG
      diesen
      this
      Sommer
      summer
      weiß.
      white
      'One wears white this summer.'

     Japanese does not require an overt/dummy subject, as is demonstrated in this example:

    1. Nichiyobi
      sunday
      heiten
      close.shop
      'We are closed on Sundays.' (after Yamamoto 2006)

     A clear distinction has been made between passives and impersonal constructions: "Whereas passivization detransitivizes a verb by deleting its logical subject, impersonalization preserves transitivity, and merely inhibits the syntactic realization of a surface subject." (Blevins 2003) | Glottopedia, 2014
  2. (Historical Syntax) A lost construction has been the topic of frequent discussion in work on English historical syntax (for instance Elmer 1981, Fischer and van der Leek 1983, 1987, Denison 1990, 1993, Allen 1995, and Anderson 1997), namely the impersonal construction. The example under (1) below is often cited to provide evidence of the impersonal construction in Old English:

    1. him
      3SM-DAT
      to-him
      ofhreow
      pity-3S.PAST
      was-pity
      þæs mannes
      the-GEN man-GEN
      because-of-the-man
      'He pitied the man' or 'The man caused pity in him' (ÆCHom I XIII.281.12)

     In the development of English, the impersonal construction disappears; processes which historically were coded in such constructions come to be construed personally. Examples such as (1) are described in the literature as "impersonal" since they have the following morphosyntactic properties:


     | Graeme Trousdale, 2008
  3. (Example)
     ○ Among the grammatical constructions that give difficulty to beginning students of Middle English is the so-called impersonal construction, as in:

    1.  thogh him gamed or smerte (Chaucer GenProl 534)
       'although to-him pleased or caused pain'
    2.  Me reweth soor of hende Nicholas (Ch. MillT 3462: Visser)
       'to-me rues sorely of gentle Nicholas'

    in which there seem to be no subjects expressed. | Eiko Ito, 1974

IMPERSONAL PRONOUN

  1. (Grammar) One is an English language, gender-neutral, indefinite pronoun that means, roughly, 'a person'. For purposes of verb agreement it is a third-person singular pronoun, though it sometimes appears with first- or second-person reference. It is sometimes called an impersonal pronoun. It is more or less equivalent to the Scots a body, the French pronoun on, the German/Scandinavian man, and the Spanish uno. It can take the possessive form one's and the reflexive form oneself, or it can adopt those forms from the generic he with his and himself. | Wikipedia, 2025
  2. (Examples)
     ○ One central strand of analyses of the "generic" or "quasiuniversal" interpretation of impersonal pronouns involves treating them as featurally impoverished pronouns which act as variables bound by a generic operator either high in the clause (Moltmann 2006, Sigurðsson and Egerland 2009, a.o.) or at the top of the DP (Ackema and Neeleman 2018). | David Hall, 2019
     ○ Impersonal pronouns such as man in Mainland Scandinavian, on in French or si in Italian appear to have some crucial properties in common. In particular, there are four major facts that need to be accounted for:

    1.  Impersonal expressions with these pronouns are compatible with both plural and singular agreement depending on context.
    2.  The same pronouns are open for both generic and arbitrary interpretations.
    3.  In contexts with specific time reference, the arbitrary interpretation of these pronouns is excluded if the predicate is ergative or passive.
    4.  These pronouns cannot be syntactic objects.

     | Verner Egerland, 2003
     ○ Person shift is discussed in an important paper by Laberge and Sankoff (1979), who describe the rising tendency of the impersonal use of tu/vous in French to fill the vacuum created by another pronoun shift—that of the indefinite pronoun on, which is taking over the function of the personal pronoun nous. Since nous is being replaced by on as a personal pronoun, tu/vous is filling the gap by serving as an impersonal pronoun. However, you is also used as an impersonal in English where no corresponding phenomenon exists. Therefore, the shift in French of on for 'we' cannot be a sufficient explanation for the change, though it may be a part of the explanation.
     The fact is that the impersonal use of personal pronouns is a rather widespread phenomenon in languages of the world. | Chisato Kitagawa and Adrienne Lehrer, 1990

IMPERSONAL VERB

  1. (Grammar) A verb that


     (Pei and Gaynor 1954, Nida 1949, Hartmann and Stork 1972) | SIL, 2003
  2. (Grammar) Impersonal verbs, which are attested in all (early) Indo-European languages, cover a wide range of expressions, varying—to some extent—in meaning and form. Despite this apparent variation they share a number of typical characteristics. Independently from the choice of verb or the nature of the other elements involved, they include third singular forms of the verb. Moreover, they typically convey one of three meanings:

    1. Meteorological conditions.
    2. Emotional and physical experience.
    3. Modal values.

     | Brigitte L.M. Bauer, 1998
  3. (Example)
     ○ In Russian there is a small class of verbs that cannot occur as the predicate of a sentence that has a subject, i.e., a NP in the nominative case with which the main verb agrees. For example:

    1.  Меня тошнило
       me felt.sick
       'I felt sick'
    2.  Его знобило
       his shivered
       'He was shivering'

     These so-called impersonal verbs share a number of syntactic and semantic properties. In this paper we will concentrate on the following interesting fact about these verbs: Impersonal verbs in Russian do not form active participles or gerunds. | Leonard H. Babby, 1975

IMPLICIT ARGUMENT
(Syntax) Reference to non-overt arguments has been made in the description of a wide range of syntactic phenomena. Some of them (PRO, pro, A/A′-traces) are relatively well understood, and there exists a certain consensus regarding their analysis. There is another class of non-overt arguments, often referred to as implicit arguments, for which no such consensus prevails. Implicit arguments do not seem to form a unified class. To appreciate this, let us examine some cases which have been argued to involve implicit arguments.

  1. Implicit agents of passives (vs. middles and unaccusatives)
    a. This ship was sunk [ PRO to collect the insurance ]. (Passive)
    b. # This ship sank [ PRO to collect the insurance ]. (Unaccusative)
    c. * This ship sinks easily [ PRO to collect the insurance ]. (Middle)
  2. Implicit arguments of nouns
    a. the negotiations [ PRO to achieve a peaceful settlement ]
    b. the use of drugs [ PRO to fall asleep ]
    c. the playing of the game [ PRO to prove a point ]
  3. Null objects (Rizzi 1986)
    Italian
    a.
     
    Questo
    this
    conduce
    leads
    (la
    the
    gente)
    people
    alla
    to.the
    seguente
    following
    conclusione
    conclusion
      'This leads (people) to the following conclusion.'
    b.
     
    Questo
    this
    conduce
    leads
    (la
    the
    gente)
    people
    a
    to
    [ PRO
     
    concludere
    conclude
    quanto
    what
    segue ].
    follows
      'This leads people to conclude what follows.'
  4. Implicit arguments of adjectives (Roeper 1987)
    a. It is necessary / * inevitable [ PRO to go ].
    b. It is wise / * probable [ PRO to go ].
  5. Implicit agents of agentive suffixes (e.g., -able)
    Goods are exportable [ PRO to improve the economy ].
 The above list includes the implicit agent of a passive, the implicit agent of a noun, null objects, the implicit argument of evaluative predicates, and the implicit agent associated with agentive suffixes like -able. | Rajesh Bhatt and Roumyana Pancheva, 2017

IMPLICIT CAUSALITY

  1. (Semantics) In causal dependent clauses, the preferred referent of a pronoun varies systematically with the verb in the main clause (contrast Sally frightens Mary because she ... with Sally loves Mary because she ...). This implicit causality phenomenon is understood to reflect intuitions about who caused the event. Researchers have debated whether these intuitions are based on linguistic structure or instead a function of high-level, non-linguistic cognition. | Joshua K. Hartshorne, 2013
  2. (Semantics) A semantic bias associated with particular verbs which affects clausal integration.

    1. John blamed Bill because he broke the window.
    2. John fascinated Bill because he was interesting.

     In Example (1) there is a preference to interpret the pronoun as referring to the character 'Bill' (Noun Phrase 2) whereas in Example (2) there is a preference to interpret the pronoun as referring to the character 'John' (Noun Phrase 1). The implicit causality congruency effect is the finding that it takes longer to read a sentence when it contains an ending inconsistent with the verb bias than an ending consistent with the verb bias. (Caramazza, Grober, Garvey, and Yates 1977) | Andrew J. Stewart, Martin J. Pickering, and Anthony J. Sanford, 1999
  3. (Psycholinguistics) Since Garvey and Caramazza's (1974) original description of the phenomenon, implicit causality has been well documented in the psycholinguistic literature where studies focus on verbs, in particular, and their influence on perceived causality (e.g., Caramazza, Grober, Garvey, and Yates 1977, Garnham, Oakhill, and Cruttenden 1992, McDonald and MacWhinney 1995). Implicit causality also features in the social psychological literature, where the focus is more on why verbs have certain perceived causality biases (e.g., Brown and Fish 1983, Au 1986) and on social interaction (e.g., Edwards and Potter 1993). Rudolph and Försterling carried out an extensive review of research on, and theories about, implicit verb causality and found that indeed "... the verb causality effect constitutes a robust and strong finding ..." (1997). | Marcelle Crinean and Alan Garnham, 2007
  4. (Example)
     ○ If people are presented with a sentence like John questioned Mary and asked to provide a cause, they tend to produce a cause associated with John, such as because he wanted to know the truth; whereas if they are presented with a sentence like John praised Mary, they tend to produce a cause associated with Mary, such as because she was responsible for the successful campaign (Garvey and Caramazza 1974). | Martin J. Pickering and Asifa Masjid, 2007

IMPLICIT CONSEQUENTIALITY

  1. (Semantics) When a consequence is not explicitly stated, it may nevertheless be implicit, just like a cause, particularly when it is not important for the development of the narrative. The way an event or state is described, and in particular the verb used, suggests which protagonist is the likely focus of the consequences of the event or state. For example, if John frightened Mary, it is unlikely that one can guess exactly what will follow as a consequence (e.g., and so she avoided him for the rest of the evening); what is more likely to be guessed is that it is Mary who suffered the consequences of being frightened.
     Consequentiality is naturally associated with interpersonal verbs. | Alan Garnham, Svenja Vorthmann, and Karolina Kaplanova, 2020
  2. (Semantics) Stewart, Pickering, and Sanford (1998) report a new type of semantic effect in addition to implicit causality, that of implicit consequentiality. In the same way that implicit causality allows us to focus on the imputed cause of an event, Stewart et al. suggest that implicit consequentiality allows us to focus on the imputed consequences of events. | Marcelle Crinean and Alan Garnham, 2007
  3. (Semantics) Crinean and Garnham (2006) suggest yet another inference associated with verbs, termed implicit consequentiality, which is concerned with whether people tend to produce consequences associated with the first or second noun phrase, and argue for a systematic relationship between the two notions. | Martin J. Pickering and Asifa Masjid, 2007

IMPLICIT CREATION VERB

  1. (Semantics) A verb that entails the creation of an entity, but that entity is not expressed by an argument of the verb:

    1.  a. Mary braided her hair.
       b. She tied her shoelaces.
       c. Mary piled the cushions.
       d. She chopped the parsley.
       e. She sliced the bread.

     Other verbs which can receive a similar interpretation in English include powder, heap, dice, cube, knot, loop, coil, copy, pickle, strand, spin, and stack. | Lisa Levinson, 2007
  2. (Semantics) Implicit creation verbs are those in which the entity created is not expressed by an argument of the verb, but is left implicit. Consider the following:

    1.  a. Jane sliced the carrots.
       b. Mary braided her hair.
       c. Sara ground the almonds.
       d. Jane tied her shoelaces.

     In these examples, the created element is not the direct object, in contrast with explicit creation verbs; the created entity is not overtly expressed at all. In (1a), for example, a slice (or slices) is created; in (1b), a braid (or braids). The created result is part of the meaning of the verb (the verbs slice and braid, for example).
     We follow Rapoport (1999), Erteschik-Shir and Rapoport (2005), and Levinson (2010), in which the created result is structurally represented. | Tova Rapoport and Aya Zarka, 2020

IMPOSSESSIBLE NOUN

  1. (Morphology) Some languages have some nouns that cannot occur as possessed nouns in a possessive construction, e.g. in Yucatec Maya (Lehmann 1998), where the nouns in (1) are among those that cannot occur with prefixed possessive person forms.

    1. Yucatec Maya (Mayan; Mexico, Belize, Guatemala)
      máak
      xchʼup
      suhuy
      ìik
      kaʼn
      yóokʼolkab
      'person'
      'woman'
      'virgin'
      'air, wind'
      'sky'
      'world'

     Such nouns are called impossessible nouns ('not possessable') by Lehmann. The phenomenon was also noted by Nichols and Bickel (2005). | Martin Haspelmath, 2017
  2. (Examples)
     ○ While the term impossessibility might be used to refer to the fact that nouns cannot be possessed at all (see Aikhenvald 2012), it is often used for nouns that cannot enter the basic possessive construction of an individual language. To avoid ambiguity, some authors suggest using the term non-directly possessible for the latter meaning (see Krasnoukhova 2012 and Rose 2023). | Françoise Rose and An Van linden, 2023
     ○ Many things may be under different forms of control by a human being. Ownership is a form of control, consumption is another one, fabrication is a third. On the other hand, entire classes of entities are uncontrollable by their very nature. This group comprises not only abstract entities, but also concrete ones like clouds and the moon. Things which are not controllable in any way are grammatically impossessible in Yucatec. | Christian Lehmann, 2022

IMPROPER MOVEMENT

  1. (Syntax) Improper movement

    1.  John seems to win the race.
    2.  * John seems wins the race.
    3.  John seems [CP <John> [TP <John> wins the race.]]
      → John moves from Spec-CP (A′) to the matrix Spec-TP (A).
      → Chomsky (1973): COMP to non-COMP movement is disallowed by stipulation.

     | Miki Obata and Samuel D. Epstein, 2008
  2. (Syntax) A central goal of this paper is to present a new generalized, parameterized, and agreement-based account of improper-movement phenomena (first discussed in Chomsky 1973), as in (1c)/(2).

    1. a. John seems to be intelligent.
      b. It seems that John is intelligent.
      c. * John seems (that) is intelligent.
    2. [TP
       
      John3
       A
      seems
      ⟵
      [CP
       
      <John2>
       A′
      [TP
      ⟵
      <John1>
       A
      [VP is intelligent]]].
      (disallowed)

     | Miki Obata and Samuel David Epstein, 2011

 

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