Finnish impersonal verbs might not be impersonal

In this talk, I argue that the Finnish -ta/-tä/-ti verbal morphology, traditionally called the “impersonal passive”, is neither inherently passive nor impersonal, but instead realizes an active Voice head that selects either a null impersonal pronoun (nip) or a referential first-person plural subject. Crucially, the same morphology can induce an active, first-person plural reading when combined with the over 1-pl pronoun, showing that the verbal morphology itself does not encode impersonality. Based on evidence from unaccusative verbs, binding, control, case assignment under negation, and morpheme ordering, I argue that these constructions are syntactically active and that the morphology is generated in Voice. Finally, I propose that the Finnish null impersonal pronoun is a silent, ϕ-featureless bare noun whose interaction with this Voice head gives rise to the impersonal interpretation, situating Finnish within a broader typology of impersonal pronouns while accounting for its distinctive syntactic behavior.