Information on the thesis

The thesis presents the analysis of  impersonal syntactic structures in the English
scholarly texts in the humanities. The research was carried out with special attention
to the performative and neo-performative hypotheses, and cartographic approach. The
impersonal  sentences,  derived  from  the  texts,  were  classified  according  to  their
structure  and  semantics:  at  first  into  three  main  groups  (impersonal  proper,  with
introductory  it,  and  clefts),  and  then  into  further  subcategories  according  to  their 20
structure.  It  has  been  established  that  these  structures  are  widely  employed  in  the
texts  analyzed,  and  at  the  same  time  their  typology  and  frequency  vary  from
discipline  to  discipline.  In  case  of  impersonal  sentences  proper  or  those  with
introductory it, the it-construction functions as an explicated higher level predicate,
and in case of clefts, it switches the roles of parts of the sentence (utterance) in terms
of  Topic-Comment  relations.    Impersonal  structures  have  also  been  considered  as
presupposition  triggers,  propositional  attitude  reports,  as  modal  operators,  and
evidential  markers.     The  observations  are  that  such  constructions  are  always
connected not only with the information structure, but also with evaluation (except
for clefts) – either modal or axiological, with the foregrounding of this evaluation,
with abolishing its logical subject. It was found that the impersonal constructions in
the  left periphery  either disambiguate the  focus  of  the utterance  proposition or  are
concerned  with  logophoric  roles  and  evidentiality.  Impersonal  constructions  in  the
left periphery of the utterance organize the discourse in the academic writing: they
are always concerned with propositions and express some kind of evaluation – either
modal or axiological, and move the Focus in utterances to the higher level predicate
which functions as mood of the utterance act (in contrast to dictum, content), and in
this way assist both scientific authors and their readership as signals indicating if a
judgment  is  true  or  possible    (problematic),  thus  helping  the  author  to  present
unsolved  questions  and  different  points  of  view,  building  dialogism.  In  addition,
being  impersonal  they  remove  personality  of  the  author  from  the  utterance,  at  the
same  time  focalizing  his  view  on  truth-conditions  of  utterances.  Research  of  the
sentences lacking semantic subject opens a different perspective on the information
structure,  as  well  as  on  the  difference  between  sentences  and  utterances:    it-
constructions  explicate  illocutionary  force  and  influence  the  understanding  of  the
Topic-Comment and Focus notions.
Keywords:  impersonal  syntactic  structure,  scientific  text,  proposition,
presupposition,  information  structure,  focus,  left  periphery,  modality,  evaluation,
neo-performative hypothesis, logophoric role, evidential strategy.