Impersonal passives and the suffix -r in the Indo-European languages

This paper analyses a number of morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features that characterise impersonal passives and r-forms in Latin, Italic, and Celtic languages. The patterns under investigation are described as non-promotional constructions that are unconstrained by verb-type and transitivity, and that exhibit a cluster of similarities with some deverbal nouns. In an Indo-European comparative perspective, the hypothesis is put forward that the impersonal r-forms of the Indo-European languages were in origin nominalised verbal forms, with *-r functioning as a derivational morpheme that could be used to create deverbal action nouns.