Impersonality may refer to:
In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection. For instance, the verb break can be conjugated to form the words break, breaks, broke, broken and breaking. While English has a relatively simple conjugation, other languages such as French and Arabic or Spanish are more complex, with each verb having dozens of conjugated forms. Some languages such as Georgian and Basque have highly complex conjugation systems with hundreds of possible conjugations for every verb.
Novial is a constructed international auxiliary language (IAL) for universal human communication between speakers of different native languages. It was devised by Otto Jespersen, a Danish linguist who had been involved in the Ido movement that evolved from Esperanto at the beginning of the 20th century, and participated later in the development of Interlingua. The name means 'new' + 'international auxiliary language'.
Volapük is a constructed language created between 1879 and 1880 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Catholic priest in Baden, Germany, who believed that God had told him in a dream to create an international language. Notable as the first major constructed international auxiliary language, the grammar comes from European languages and the vocabulary mostly from English. However, the roots are often distorted beyond recognition.
A verb is a word that in syntax generally conveys an action, an occurrence, or a state of being. In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive. In many languages, verbs are inflected to encode tense, aspect, mood, and voice. A verb may also agree with the person, gender or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object. Verbs have tenses: present, to indicate that an action is being carried out; past, to indicate that an action has been done; future, to indicate that an action will be done.
The morphology of Irish is in some respects typical of an Indo-European language. Nouns are declined for number and case, and verbs for person and number. Nouns are classified by masculine or feminine gender. Other aspects of Irish morphology, while typical for an Insular Celtic language, are not typical for Indo-European, such as the presence of inflected prepositions and the initial consonant mutations. Irish syntax is also rather different from that of most Indo-European languages, due to its use of the verb–subject–object word order.
Spanish is a grammatically inflected language, which means that many words are modified ("marked") in small ways, usually at the end, according to their changing functions. Verbs are marked for tense, aspect, mood, person, and number. Nouns follow a two-gender system and are marked for number. Personal pronouns are inflected for person, number, gender, and a very reduced case system; the Spanish pronominal system represents a simplification of the ancestral Latin system.
Italian grammar is the body of rules describing the properties of the Italian language. Italian words can be divided into the following lexical categories: articles, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections.
In grammar, a reflexive verb is, loosely, a verb whose direct object is the same as its subject, for example, "I wash myself". More generally, a reflexive verb has the same semantic agent and patient. For example, the English verb to perjure is reflexive, since one can only perjure oneself. In a wider sense, the term refers to any verb form whose grammatical object is a reflexive pronoun, regardless of semantics; such verbs are also more broadly referred to as pronominal verbs, especially in the grammar of the Romance languages. Other kinds of pronominal verbs are reciprocal, passive, subjective, and idiomatic. The presence of the reflexive pronoun changes the meaning of a verb, e.g., Spanish abonar to pay, abonarse to subscribe.
In linguistics, an impersonal verb is one that has no determinate subject. For example, in the sentence "It rains", rain is an impersonal verb and the pronoun it corresponds to an exophoric referrent. 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. Impersonal verbs are also called weather verbs because they frequently appear in the context of weather description. Also, indefinite pronouns may be called "impersonal", as they refer to an unknown person, like one or someone, and there is overlap between the use of the two.
A dummy pronoun, also known as an expletive pronoun, is a deictic pronoun that fulfills a syntactical requirement without providing a contextually explicit meaning of its referent. As such, it is an example of exophora.
An anticausative verb is an intransitive verb that shows an event affecting its subject, while giving no semantic or syntactic indication of the cause of the event. The single argument of the anticausative verb is a patient, that is, what undergoes an action. One can assume that there is a cause or an agent of causation, but the syntactic structure of the anticausative makes it unnatural or impossible to refer to it directly. Examples of anticausative verbs are break, sink, move, etc.
In English grammar, the personal pronoun you can often be used in the place of one, the singular impersonal pronoun, in colloquial speech.
Hupa is an Athabaskan language spoken along the lower course of the Trinity River in Northwestern California by the Hoopa Valley Hupa and Tsnungwe/South Fork Hupa and, before European contact, by the Chilula and Whilkut peoples, to the west.
Tauya not to be mistaken with Tauya the Zambian indie artist, is a Rai Coast language spoken in the Ramu River valley, Madang Province, Papua New Guinea by approximately 350 people. The Linguistics Department at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, has Tauya language resources.
The impersonal passive voice is a verb voice that decreases the valency of an intransitive verb to zero.
Tiri, or Mea, is an Oceanic language of New Caledonia.
Cornish grammar is the grammar of the Cornish language, an insular Celtic language closely related to Breton and Welsh and, to a lesser extent, to Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic. It was the main medium of communication of the Cornish people for much of their history until the 17th century, when a language shift occurred in favour of English. A revival, however, started in 1904, with the publication of A Handbook of the Cornish Language, by Henry Jenner, and since then there has been a growing interest in the language.
Spanish personal pronouns have distinct forms according to whether they stand for the subject (nominative) or object, and third-person pronouns make an additional distinction for direct object (accusative) or indirect object (dative), and for reflexivity as well. Several pronouns also have special forms used after prepositions.
Spanish object pronouns are Spanish personal pronouns that take the function of the object in the sentence. Object pronouns may be both clitic and non-clitic, with non-clitic forms carrying greater emphasis. When used as clitics, object pronouns are generally proclitic, i.e. they appear before the verb of which they are the object; enclitic pronouns appear with positive imperatives, infinitives, and gerunds. Non-clitic forms, by contrast, can appear anywhere in the sentence but can only rarely be used without their clitic counterparts. When used together, clitic pronouns cluster in specific orders based primarily on person, and clitic doubling is often found as well. In many dialects in Central Spain, including that of Madrid, there exists the phenomenon of leísmo, which is using the indirect object pronoun le as the direct object pronoun where most other dialects would use lo (masculine) or la (feminine).
The Ingrian language is a highly endangered language spoken in Ingria, Russia. Ingrian is a Uralic language of the Finnic branch, along with, among others, Finnish and Estonian. Ingrian is an agglutinative language and exhibits both vowel harmony and consonant gradation.