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Impersonal verbs have no real subject and are often used with dummy pronouns like “it” or “there”. They are common in sentences about the weather and in inflected languages like Latin. Some recommend avoiding them, but certain clichés cannot be rephrased. To determine if a sentence has an impersonal verb, look for an antecedent for the pronoun.
An impersonal verb is a verb that has no real subject because it does not represent an action or state of being. Sentences containing personal verbs typically have a subject noun: a person, place, or thing that acts in the sentence. Instead of a subject, a sentence with an impersonal verb usually begins with an impersonal or “dummy” pronoun, such as “it” or “there” in English. Impersonal verbs are found in many other languages with various other constructions.
Impersonal verbs are occasionally called “weather verbs” because of their frequent use in sentences about the weather, such as “It snows regularly during the winter months in Michigan.” In this example, “neve” is the impersonal verb and “it” is the impersonal pronoun that serves as the grammatical subject of the sentence. Many Romance languages contain similar constructions, such as the French il neige, which means “it is snowing.”
In highly inflected languages like Latin, impersonal verbs can be very common because inflected verbs don’t necessarily require a subject. The simple verb amat, for example, has the ending -at, indicating that the subject is “he/she/it”. No pronoun is needed to make the subject clear. Similarly, the impersonal verb lecit, meaning “it is permitted,” does not require a subject independent of the verb. This construction lacks the dummy pronoun that can make impersonal verbs in English awkward.
Some rhetoricians recommend avoiding impersonal verbs and instead rephrasing a sentence to contain an active verb whenever possible. The sentence “There are six elephants in the zoo,” for example, can be rewritten as “Six elephants live in the zoo.” Certain clichés, however, do not lend themselves to easy restructuring.
To determine if an English sentence that begins with a pronoun contains an impersonal verb, one can look to see if the pronoun has an antecedent. If not, it’s probably an impersonal verb. The following series of examples make this clear: “Mt. Kenya is 17,057 feet (5,199 m) high. It has many species of wildlife”, compared to: “Mt. Kenya is 17,057 feet (5,199 m) high. It often rains there.”
Although the two pairs of sentences look similar on the surface, the first has an impersonal verb, but the second does not. The pronoun “it” in the first example has an antecedent: mt. Kenya. The second example, however, has no antecedent, no previous name to which it refers. The mountain does not rain, it rains. The lack of an antecedent indicates that “it rains” is an impersonal verb in this sentence.
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