The structure of null subject DPs and agreement in Polish impersonal constructions 155
(35) Gotuje /Gotowało się zupę.
cook.pres 3 sg /cook.past 3 sg.n się soup.acc
‘[One] cooks/is cooking/cooked soup.’
However, as was argued in Section 2.4, the feature make-up of the impersonal pro-
noun in the SIĘ construction is different from a 3rd person singular pronoun in that
the former, semantically speaking, is plural, includes the speaker and the hearer in
its reference, and it is either feminine or masculine. Because of that, the impersonal
pronoun is not a 3rd person singular pronoun. This, in turn, indicates that agreement
is established by default.
As for the –NO/–TO construction, it has been argued in the previous section
that the impersonal subject pronoun in this construction has its [non-specific] fea-
ture specified in the course of derivation as either [+generic] or [+arbitrary], and it is
inherently specified for the feature [+masculine]. The example in (36) shows, however,
that the inflectional marking on the verb is an exponent neither of this nor, for that
matter, of any of the phi-features.
(36) Gotowano zupę.
cooked soup.acc
‘[People] cooked/were cooking soup.’
This suggests that agreement is established in the same way as in the impersonal SIĘ
construction that is, by default. To be more specific, the verb would move to v and then
to the head of VoiceP, where as argued below the –NO/–TO suffix is first merged. The
suffix would be merged with only some of its features specified.^30 The whole complex
(that is, (T+(Voice(–N/–T))+v+V)) would enter an Agree relation with the imper-
sonal subject pronoun. Because there is no morph in Polish to represent the constella-
tion of features present on the subject pronoun, this results in a default realization of
inflectional marking on the suffix, as -O. The suffix -O appears to be a part of the larger
morpheme -ŁO which is a 3rd person singular neuter morph attached to verbs in the
past tense. The fact that only a piece of this inflectional morphology (i.e. -O) is present
on the [v+V+Voice] may stem from the morphophonetic restriction on a cluster such
as *-nł(o) to appear in an onset of a syllable. This, however, still does not explain why
the cluster -tło is not possible, especially that it does appear in the onset of a syllable in
such a word as for example tło ‘background’.
A different possibility is offered by Lavine (2005). In his account, the –NO/–TO
suffix is an autonomous element with its morpho-syntactic features specified in the
Lexicon. In this account as well, we assume that it is ‘picked up’ by the verb which
moves to the head of VoiceP. Then, as in the previous account the whole complex
- One of these features would be tense as the whole construction can only refer to the past.