Non-nominative arguments, active impersonals and control in Latin

The continuum of control plays a crucial role in the marking of transitivity in Latin, determining the alternation between the personal and impersonal encoding of some transitive predicates. The present study investigates the marking of arguments with some 'impersonal' predicates (e.g., me delectat 'it delights me', me pudet 'it shames me'). It is shown that these patterns are not truly 'impersonal', but reflect the crystallization of a widespread construction in the early stages of the language, probably of Indo-European inheritance, the use of the third person singular active with an accusative and/or oblique argument to denote the lack of control of the A/S argument and the involitionality/spontaneous manifestation of a situation, a pattern that gave way, in the course of time, to the competing (medio-)passive form. The coding of verbal arguments in some impersonal constructions in Latin thus points to the existence of a dependent-marked agentive coding subsystem, similar to analogous constructions in languages with semantic alignment, giving further evidence for Latin as a language with a mixed alignment system, a syntactically based (nominative-accusative) and a semantically based alignment, sensitive to the notion of control.