Setting-subject construction: A case study of impersonal passives in Persian

This article attempts to explore the impersonal passive construction in Persian within the framework of Cognitive Grammar. It aims to introduce how the impersonals are unfolded in this approach, and then on the basis of it, to analyze the Persian impersonal passive. In contrast to personal passives, impersonal passive constructions have only one participant. They need not to encode the agent, and there is no recipient of the energy. Cognitive Grammar introduces a construction called 'setting-subject' construction in which setting is considered as the most prominent element (trajector). Regarding the phonological pole of the impersonal passives in Persian, two tokens are considered: in the first one, it is the setting which has the maximal prominence within which the event unfolds. In the data of the second token neither the participant nor the setting is prominent, however it is the event (state) which is considered as the trajector. The construction is analyzed as designating an abstract and generalized setting; in such a construction the conceptualizer is responsible to profile the setting according to the non-linguistic context.