Об истории изучения безличности в русском языке
The history of research on impersonality in Russian

Summary/Abstract: This article explores the evolution of scholarly approaches to understanding impersonal structures in the Russian language, from the 18th century, when they emerged, to the present day. The continuity of viewpoints among scholars across different periods was revealed. The main properties of impersonality, as one of the most controversial linguistic categories, were summarized. A number of key trends in the analyzed grammatical descriptions were found, including a progressively refined and increasingly complex understanding of impersonality scope, the synthesis of philosophical grammar and comparative historical method, the interest in the origins of impersonal structures, the efforts to distinguish between the grammatical and semantic subjects, and the transition to a multi-level interpretation of impersonality. It was demonstrated that modern linguistic conceptions of impersonality treat it as part of a broader field of personhood and assign multiple functions to the grammatical person, particularly in expressing the relationship between an action and its agent, which in turn resolves many logical and grammatical inconsistencies and supports the idea that impersonality is a linguistic phenomenon that can be identified across languages regardless of their morphosyntactic parameters.

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