Keyword: «impersonal sentences»

The paper considers the category of impersonality and impersonal sentences, describes the differences in impersonal constructions in Russian and English, gives a classification of impersonal sentences in English, as well as comparative examples of the translation of impersonal sentences from Russian to English and vice versa. Impersonal sentences are not always translated by similar structures, because of this, the grammatical structure changes, but the identical meaning remains. The issue of translating impersonal sentences in Russian and English remains relevant.

The paper defines the status of impersonal sentences in the Russian language: grammatical nature, origin and development. The analysis of various points of view on the essence of the category of impersonality, on the problem of impersonal sentences in the syntactic system of the language is proposed.

This paper presents a comparative analysis of two types of impersonal sentences in modern Russian ‒ the object-subject and the instrumental-subject constructions ‒ based on A.V. Petrov’s structural-semantic classification. It examines the key syntactic and semantic features of each construction: the neutralization of the subject–object opposition in object-subject sentences, and, in instrumental-subject sentences, the syncretic function of the instrumental case, which merges the meanings of instrument and causer. Drawing on minimal oppositions, the study identifies clear functional differences between the two types: the former highlight a spontaneous process with an unexpressed causer, whereas the latter explicitly encode the cause of the state. The findings confirm that both constructions are self-sufficient impersonal sentence types, distinguished above all by their degree of semantic abstraction and their grammatical construal of the causal source.