Impersonal middles in German

We develop an analysis of impersonal middles in German which capitalizes on the observed similarities between personal and impersonal middles, and on Lekakou’s (2005) treatment of the former as disposition ascriptions. We argue that the disposition in impersonal middles is ascribed to an event(uality), rather than an event participant. The non-omissible ‘it’ subject pronoun functions as the syntactic and semantic subject. We further propose that the pronoun refers to the event denoted by the verbal predicate by virtue of taking as its associate the vP. The additional modifier is required for pragmatic reasons, namely in order to restrict the generalization made.