Impersonal Construction with the Noun ‘Thing’ in Subject Position in Pwo Karen

Pwo Karen has an impersonal construction, in which chə, a noun meaning ‘thing’, assumes the subject position without the original lexical meaning. In this paper, clauses exhibiting this feature are called “chə-clauses”. The usages of chə-clauses can be classified into four types, considering the motivations with which they are used, as follows: (i) the agent is generic, (ii) information about the agent is irrelevant, (iii) the clause denotes a meteorological phenomenon, and (iv) a physiological/psychological state is uncontrollable. Usages (i) and (ii) are discourse motivated, while (iii) and (iv) are semantics motivated. The functions of chə-clauses can be considered to be related to agent defocusing, and Usages (i) and (ii) can be seen as covering the lower three rows of the cline of agent defocusing proposed by Sansò (2006)