Залоговые характеристики имперсонального транзитива с творительным дополнением

The Russian impersonal transitive and its characteristics in terms of voice

This paper investigates the voice of the Russian impersonal transitive (e.g. lodku uneslo vetrom), which involves two arguments: an accusative and an instrumental. Most of the numerous studies on the Russian impersonal transitive focus on the formal make-up of these constructions and on their semantics. This article aims at to describe the Russian impersonal transitive in terms of voice. The impersonal transitive is usually considered to be a passive. The main property of a passive is subject demotion. In the impersonal transitive, NP in the instrumental case is the causer initiating an event, and it is considered a form of subject demotion. However, an impersonal transitive and a passive are not identical. This paper argues that the impersonal transitive is a mixed-voice construction because although the subject is marginalized, the object of action (the theme) remains in the accusative case, not moving to the position of grammatical subject, and the verb remains in the active voice. Therefore, unlike a passive, which focuses on the state of the object of an action, occupying the position of grammatical subject, in an impersonal transitive, no argument of the verb receives communicative saliency, and due to this, the action itself is focused. All of this creates the hybrid voice characteristics of the impersonal transitive.