• Linguistische Treffen in Wrocław •

This paper is concerned with a special kind of impersonal constructions in Polish. The relevant constructions have a demoted subject with reduced referentiality and arbitrary interpretation. In particular these are the so called -no/-to-construction, the reflexive impersonal and the 3pl construction. Researchers agree that these constructions imply a subject that is obligatorily [+human], but even with human referents these constructions exhibit different degrees of acceptability with different verbs. These differences seem to depend on the agentivity of the implicit subject caused by the verb. We will follow Dowty’s (1991) proposal, in which the agent is considered a prototype category that is decomposed into different semantic role features.