The young Edmund Husserl stressed that the success of his philosophy hinged upon ability to determine subject and predicate impersonal propositions their expressions, such as ‘It is raining’. This essay accordingly investigates tenability Husserl’s early thought, by executing first study analysis from late 1890s. examination reshapes our understanding inception phenomenology in two ways. First,...

This paper is about the impersonal passive construction of which modern Irish, a VSO language, has two forms. The impersonal passive form occurs with all verbs of Irish, across all tenses, whether intransitive or transitive. In the second form, the impersonal passive form is to be found productively with the substantive verb (one of the two verbs of ‘to be’ in Irish) across all tenses. It does ...

Impersonal constructions are interesting from a typological perspective. Siewierska (2008: 3–4) finds that “[t]he semantic characterizations of impersonality centre on two notions”, either “the lack of a human agent controlling the depicted situation or event” or “situations or events which may be brought about by a human agent but crucially one which is not specified.” The present article focu...

What does it mean to solve a distributed task? In Paxos, Lamport proposed a definition of solvability in which every process is split into a proposer that submits commands to be executed, an acceptor that takes care of the command execution order, and a learner that receives the outcomes of executed commands. The resulting perspective of computation in which every proposed command can be execut...

A dialogue system can present itself and/or address the user as an active agent by means of linguistic constructions in personal style, or suppress agentivity by using impersonal style. We describe how we generate and control personal and impersonal style variation in the output of SAMMIE, a multimodal in-car dialogue system for an MP3 player. We carried out an experiment to compare subjective ...