The problems of describing the category of impersonality in the French language

Abstract

The article concerns the problems of analyzing and classifying the means of expression for the category of impersonality in the French language. The relevance of the research is determined, on the one hand, by the incompleteness of the scientific picture in this area, and, on the other hand, by the scale and synthetic nature of the material under study. The difficulties of defining the concept of «impersonal» and related terms are described. These difficulties are caused by the existence of a large number of word combinations with the lexeme «impersonal» and the intersections that arise when interpreting them. The principles of classifying the means of expression for the category of impersonality are also outlined: for this purpose, the approaches of some French grammarians with their common features and differences are presented. Related to these issues is the problem of determining the language level to analyze the means of expression for the category of impersonality. The work used general scientific methods of analysis, comparison, generalization, as well as the analysis of dictionary definitions of terms, co-lexemic and contextual analysis. The indicated difficulties give grounds for attempts to further classifying the means of expression for the category of impersonality using alternative approaches, one of which could be the construction grammar.

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