Impersonal pronouns are prototypically used in generic sentences to make generalizations about people. Yet they unlike bare plural people or indefinite singular a person that exhibit sensitivity first-person perspective. This relationship can be seen ( a) inferences of experience associated with use these pronouns, b) additional meaning components carried by impersonally personal involving pres...

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 ...