Impersonal Verbs and Their Lexical Specification

That Russian impersonal Vs do not form active participles or gerunds is dealt with, & the most appropriate way of entering such a fact in the grammar is discussed. It is argued that these defects in the paradigm of impersonal Vs are not accidental, but occur as the result of transformational rules. There is a causal relation between the occurrence of gerunds & active participles & a subject NP. In the derivation of both active participles & gerunds, the subject NP of an underlying embedded sentence must be deleted. Hence, it is predictable that Vs excluding subject NPs cannot occur in the surface structure as gerund or active participles. The most appropriate way to incorporate this information in a grammar is not to mention it. A speaker who has internalized the subcategorization feature of impersonal Vs & the relevant syntactic rules is not able to generate the nonoccurring forms. A. Orianne