• semantic map
• Construction Grammar
• impersonal
• Latin

Impersonal constructions have often proved problematic in the history of Western linguistic thought. The notion of impersonality, which presumably developed within Latin grammatical tradition, first indicated a restricted though heterogeneous set of verbs occurring in Latin and, to a lesser extent, in Ancient Greek, which were characterized by a fixed 3rd person singular marking and a non-canonical argument structure, if any. This basically Latin-oriented conception and its subsequent stratifications were called into question by the 19th century debate on impersonals, which was in turn involved in a discussion on syntactic categories. In the 20th century, all the inadequacies of the old notion of ‘impersonal’ have surfaced, especially in typological research, whereas the traditional, universal category of subject has been questioned in various ways. The present work aims at returning to Latin impersonals with a functional-typological perspective, more specifically by applying a construction grammar approach to Latin active voice impersonals.