From the Impersonal Passive 'it was told that ～' (etc.) to the Personal Passive 'he was told that ～' (etc.): A Comparative Observation Based on the Various Versions of the Bible

Abstract

1.1. The main purpose of the present paper is first to consider the remarkable prevalence in the AVI of impersonal passive constructions with verbs of saying, of the type tt was told him that-', etc., to examine what precedent factors, both internal and external, caused them to be inherited there, and then to observe how in the late Modern English Versions of the Bible there has grown a general tendency for the impersonal passive to be replaced by the corresponding personal passive, such as of the type :he was told that-. ' etc. 1.2. Before embarking on the main theme of making an analytic description of the relevant examples taken from the AV, I think it proper to survey the general process of the kind of impersonal passive under consideration, as inherited from the OE period down to the period of early Modern English, that is, the English of the AV. Two typical OE verbs of saying used in the construction concerned are secgan ( > say) and quedan (cf. quoth). They are used in the impersonal passive with a dative (or dative equivalent) of person, followed by a complementary2 clause which is introduced by the subordinating conjunction fuet ( > that) or the dependent interrogative or indefinite relative hwe~t (>what), hu (>how), etc. In this type of construction it was usual that the formal subject hit (>it) was left unexpressed.3 One example is :