Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2024 / Formal Logical Modeling of Impersonal Sentences in the English Language

Formal Logical Modeling of Impersonal Sentences in the English Language

Paper · 2024 · V. N. Malysheva, E. V. Kurganskaia and G. A. Demin

Summary

The paper asks whether English "impersonal" sentences really lack a subject. Examples include clauses with dummy it, existential there, generic one/they, and passives that open with another element. The authors work in formal grammar and use the "binomiality idea," a two-part modelling scheme developed at Saint Petersburg Electrotechnical University (LETI) since 1993. In this scheme, every sentence member is built from a semifinitive fixed by a specifier, so a subject is modelled as a substantive semifinitive multiplied by a space specifier. They apply the model to independent declarative and interrogative clauses with active and passive verbs. Their conclusion is that these constructions are impersonal only semantically. Grammatically they are always third-person singular with a real subject, which may be explicit, semi-implicit (carried by a weak there) or implicit. Subject ellipsis never occurs in them. The study is purely theoretical: it uses no corpus, treebank or quantitative evaluation. The authors justify the work by pointing out that empty, desemanticised elements are hard to describe algorithmically and cause machine-translation errors.

Key points

  • Active impersonal clauses always show an explicit subject: one, they or it.
  • Passive impersonals mostly use it and, much less often, there.
  • If the subject–predicate pair does not start the clause, the subject may go unmarked. The authors treat this as an implicit subject, not as ellipsis.
  • Three space specifiers are distinguished: super-strong it, strong there and weak there.
  • In declaratives, an intensifying element licenses the implicit subject. In questions, an interrogative element does.
  • Semi-implicit subjects are described as rare and implicit ones as very rare.
  • In a fragment like "Why said?", the missing material is the tense and space elements together ("is it"), not the subject alone.
  • Generic one is said to keep a faint lexical meaning, because it pairs only with verbs of actions a human can perform.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Expletive it/there can be treated as grammatically real subjects that carry no meaning, which separates syntax from semantics cleanly.
  • I2. One (and generic they) is not fully empty and implies a human doer, unlike dummy it.
  • I3. A clause that seems to lack a subject may be a case of implicit structure, which differs from ellipsis of a single word.
  • I4. Grading subject markers by "strength" gives a small feature set for telling apart explicit, semi-implicit and implicit subjects.
  • I5. The authors are motivated by the observation that desemanticised elements break machine translation, and they argue English cannot drop such subjects.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): Map UD expl subjects to a filled-but-empty grammatical slot, never to an agent role. The frame then records "agent unspecified" explicitly instead of inventing a participant.
  • I2 (world): Introduce a generic-person entity for one/they impersonals so that later questions about "who does this" have a principled, explainable referent.
  • I3 (tree): When parsing subjectless passive fragments such as "Why said?", restore a null auxiliary-plus-expletive unit as one recoverable piece. The step stays transparent and does not leave the clause headless.
  • I4 (tree): Add subtype features to expl nodes during UD dialect conversion, for example it versus stressed there versus weak there. Downstream stages could then branch on them instead of guessing.
  • I5 (back): When generating English from the meaning graph, insert the obligatory expletive subject by rule. This applies especially when translating from pro-drop or impersonal source structures through the meta-world.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

Also on the byline: Saint Petersburg State Electrotechnical University.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 18,614 worksArtificial Intelligence · 17,965 worksArts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,379 works

Cite

Cite as V. N. Malysheva, E. V. Kurganskaia and G. A. Demin. 2024. Formal Logical Modeling of Impersonal Sentences in the English Language. Discourse 10 (Дискурс 10).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.32603/2412-8562-2024-10-3-138-151

@inproceedings{malysheva2024formal,
  title = {{Formal Logical Modeling of Impersonal Sentences in the English Language}},
  author = {V. N. Malysheva, E. V. Kurganskaia and G. A. Demin},
  booktitle = {Discourse 10 (Дискурс 10)},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.32603/2412-8562-2024-10-3-138-151},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.32603/2412-8562-2024-10-3-138-151}
}

References

12 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Виноградов В. В. История русских лингвистических учений. М.: Высшая школа, 1978. find
  2. Смирницкий А. И. Синтаксис английского языка. М.: Изд-во лит. на иностр. яз., 1957. find
  3. Мещанинов И. И. Члены предложения и части речи. Л.: Наука, 1978. find
  4. Бархударов Л. С. Структура простого предложения современного английского языка. М.: Изд-во ЛКИ, 2008. find
  5. Бейкер М. К. Атомы языка: грамматика в темном поле сознания / пер. с англ. В. В. Кадина и др.; под ред. О. В. Митрениной, О. А. Митрофановой. М.: Изд-во ЛКИ, 2008. find
  6. Балли Ш. Язык и жизнь / пер. с фр. И. И. Челышевой, Е. А. Вельмезовой. М.: Едиториал УРСС, 2003. find
  7. Есперсен О. Философия грамматики / пер. с англ. В. В. Пассека, С. П. Сафроновой. М.: Ко-мКнига, 2006. find
  8. Финогина Л. Н. Функционирование и грамматический статус лексемы it в современном английском языке: автореф. дис. … канд. филол. наук / Одесса, 1982. find
  9. Кацнельсон С. Д. Типология языка и речевое мышление. Л.: Наука, 1972. find
  10. Бакарева А. П. Структура предложения как средство связи предложений в сверхфразо-вом единстве (на материале современного английского языка): автореф. дис. ... канд. филол. наук / М., 1981. find
  11. Мейе А. Введение в сравнительное изучение индоевропейских языков / пер. с фр. Д. Кудрявского, А. Сухотина. М., Л.: Гос. соц.-экон. изд-во, 1938. find
  12. Ильиш Б. А. История английского языка. М.: Высш. шк., 1968. Информация об авторах. Малышева Валерия Николаевна – аспирантка кафедры иностранных языков Санкт-Петербургского государственного электротехнического университета «ЛЭТИ» им. В. И. Ульянова (Ленина), ул. Профессора Попова, д. 5Ф, Санкт-Петербург, 197022, Россия. Автор восьми научных публикаций. Сфера научных интересов: сравнительно-истори-ческое языкознание, германские языки, фоносемантика, общее языкознание. Курганская Екатерина Владимировна – аспирантка кафедры иностранных языков Санкт-Петербургского государственного электротехнического университета «ЛЭТИ» им. В. И. Ульянова (Ленина), ул. Профессора Попова, д. 5Ф, Санкт-Петербург, 197022, Россия. Автор десяти научных публикаций. Сфера научных интересов: компьютерная лингвистика, германские языки, дискурсивный анализ. Дёмин Георгий Андреевич – аспирант кафедры иностранных языков Санкт-Петербургского государственного электротехнического университета «ЛЭТИ» им. В. И. Ульянова (Ленина), ул. Профессора Попова, д. 5Ф, Санкт-Петербург, 197022, Россия. Автор пяти научных публикаций. Сфера научных интересов: германские языки, языковая интерференция, со-циолингвистика, языковые контакты. О конфликте интересов, связанном с данной публикацией, не сообщалось. Поступила 27.03.2024; принята после рецензирования 13.04.2024; опубликована онлайн 24.06.2024. Формально-логическая модель безличных предложений в английском языке Formal Logical Modeling of Impersonal Sentences in the English Language Языкознание Linguistics ДИСКУРС. 2024. Т. 10, № 3. C. 138–151 DISCOURSE. 2024, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 138–151

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/malysheva-2024-formal-logical-modeling-impersonal-sentences/