Voice, impersonal construction, and zero lexeme: formalization of crucial notions

Abstract The paper considers a relatively rare verbal syntactic construction found in East Sakhalin Ainu and in Lingala: an active form of a transitive verb governs simultaneously a direct object and an agentive complement, has no overt syntactic subject and is in the 3rd person plural. In order to characterize this verb form, three sets of formal linguistic notions are introduced and described: voice (with a calculus of logically possible voice grammemes), impersonal construction, and zero lexeme; many illustrations come from Lingala and Kinyarwanda, as well as several other languages. The verb forms under analysis are shown to be the partial demotional passive.