In many languages the verb takes a third person singular inflection and often appears with an expletive subject.
In the active voice, impersonal verbs can be used to express operation of nature, mental distress, and acts with no reference to the doer.
The term "impersonal" simply means that the verb does not change according to grammatical person.
In terms of valency, impersonal verbs are often avalent, as they often lack semantic arguments.
In addition, the participating snow is non-specific, and lacks a clear semantic role.
In Palestinian Arabic, "Id-dunya ti-shti" translates to "It (the world) is raining" and uses a non-impersonal verb.
"Vreme je sunčano", which means "the weather is sunny", is a common Serbian construction that uses a (non-impersonal) adverb rather than a verb.
The Finnic impersonal construction enables an event or state to be described without specifying the identity of the agent (actor).
[5] Finnish: SunnuntainaSunday-onvoican.PRS.3sgnukkuasleep.INFpitkään.long.Sunnuntaina voi nukkua pitkään.Sunday-on can.PRS.3sg sleep.INF long.Estonian: PühapäevitiSundays-onsaabcan.PRS.3sgsissein.ILLmagada.sleep.INFPühapäeviti saab sisse magada.Sundays-on can.PRS.3sg in.ILL sleep.INFOn Sundays you/one can sleep in.There is a lack of an overt nominative subject in these constructions.
In some languages such as English, French, German, Dutch and Swedish, an impersonal verb always takes an impersonal pronoun (it in English, il in French, es in German, het in Dutch, det in Swedish) as its syntactical subject: Occasionally an impersonal verb will allow an object to appear in apposition to the impersonal subject pronoun: Or as an instrumental adjunct: In some other languages (necessarily null subject languages and typically pro-drop languages), such as Portuguese, Spanish, Occitan, Catalan, Italian, Romanian, in Hungarian and all the Slavic languages, an impersonal verb takes no subject at all, but it is conjugated in the third-person singular, which is much as though it had a third-person, singular subject.
One checks to see if a given subject pronoun takes an antecedent in the previous clause or sentence, e.g.
When used as an impersonal verb in the present tense, it has a special conjugation for the third person singular (hay).
Spanish will add the pronoun se in front of verbs to form general sentences.
Compare: Impersonal verbs are relatively common in German, often in constructions about a state or process.
For weather, personal verbs are used in Celtic languages, e.g. Welsh Mae hi'n bwrw eira 'it is snowing'.
[14] manitmiiexistphîïghostnayinbâanhouseniithisdûayalsorəəQuesman mii phîï nay bâan nii dûay rəəit exist ghost in house this also QuesIs there also a ghost in this house?Subdivision into non-inception and inception subclasses can occur depending on whether the verb may occur with the path adverb khin 'up'.
[20] An impersonal pronoun, when used, serves as an empty placeholder, or "dummy subject", for the sentence.
[23] In French In English Null objects can be understood as implicit anaphoric direct objects, that is, those whose referents can be understood from the prior or ongoing discourse context as well as sufficiently salient in that context not only to be encoded pronominally, but even to be entirely omitted.
They involve a general concern in generative grammar: determining the nature and distribution of phonetically null but syntactically present entities (empty categories).
Since, by definition, these entities are absent from the speech signal, it is of interest that language learners still can come to have information about them.
As this phenomenon could not have resulted from sufficient prior experience, it suggests the role of universal grammar.