The impersonal construction in Old Norse

In the introduction to this dissertation I defined the grammatical term "impersonal" and gave some examples of impersonal constructions in English and other Indo-European languages. In this connection I showed that Old Norse impersonal constructions are always subjectless constructions, in contrast to the impersonalia of other old Germanic languages, which frequently have indefinite subjects; and I showed that in this respect Old Norse has preserved a Proto-Germanic syntactic feature which the West Germanic languages had largely lost by the time they came to be recorded. I went on to discuss the two main methods of approach to the study of impersonalia and of language in general, namely, the philosophico-psychological approach which was common in the nineteenth century, and the positivistic approach which is predominant in this country today; and I adopted the latter method for my study of Old Norse impersonalia. I then stated the general plan of my treatise: to present descriptively the Old Norse impersonalia which I had collected and then to compare them with West Germanic (chiefly Old English) impersonalia; and to make this proposed comparison more significant I summarized Delbruck's treatment of subjectless impersonalia in some of the older Indo-European languages.;Chapter VIII was devoted to a brief comparison between Old Norse impersonal constructions and those discussed by Delbruck. This comparison showed that every type of impersonal construction cited by Delbruck occurs in Old Norse.;In Chapter IX I presented Wahlen's systematization of the Old English impersonalia and compared it with the Old Norse data which I had collected. This comparison showed that the classes of impersonalia in the two languages are remarkably similar, despite the presence of numerous impersonal verbs in each language which have no exact semantic counterparts in the other. I therefore concluded that considerable analogical extension of impersonalia has taken place in both languages, but that with minor exceptions it has done so within categories which existed in Proto-Germanic.;In Chapter II I stated my sources of Old Norse impersonalia and my criteria for determining when Old Norse expressions are impersonal, after which I listed the five main categories into which I have grouped my collection of such constructions. These are: Expressions denoting processes involving the human organism, those denoting natural phenomena, those denoting situations in which fate (i.e., the unknown) is involved, those in which a definite subject "it" can be supplied, and those in which a definite subject or agent "one, they" can be supplied. Each of the following chapters, III through VII, contained my examples of impersonalia for one of these categories.