As its name indicates, impersonal verbs are those that do not have a person, that is, they do not incorporate a personal pronoun and therefore do not have a subject. The impersonal verbs, also called defectives, are the so-called meteorological verbs (for example, the verb forms such as it is raining or snowing), the verb to have with its third person singular form (there will be, there was or there is) and also when it is used he is impersonal (it is said or spoken).
Illustrative examples of sentences with impersonal verbs
If I affirm "in the tropical forest it rains a lot" we can see that we have information about the place where the action occurs (the tropical forest) and about the amount of rain (a lot), but no subject appears, since no one performs the action. In this case, we would be talking about a sentence with the impersonal verb to rain.
When saying "there are many shirts in the closet", it can be seen that there is a direct complement (many shirts), but there is not a subject either, since we are using the verb to have, which is impersonal. In this sense, it must be remembered that it would not be correct to say that "there were many t-shirts in the closet", since there must always be the singular, regardless of whether the direct object is in the singular or plural.
In the sentence "it dawns very early", we find an impersonal sentence because the verb sunrise refers to a phenomenon of nature and, consequently, there is no subject that accompanies it.
Impersonal communication versus personal communication
When we communicate we can speak in an impersonal way. Thus, if I say "it did not make sense" or "that makes things look negatively" we are communicating in an impersonal way and in this way the speaker is not emotionally involved in the message. If we want to transmit our own connection with our ideas, we will be faced with a circumstance of personal communication. In this sense it is very different to say "I consider you to be wrong" or to say "you are considered to be wrong".
The classification of sentences according to the type of subject
Depending on the type of subject, there are the already mentioned impersonal sentences and, on the other hand, personal sentences. A personal sentence is understood to be one that has a subject, which can be an explicit subject in the sentence (I'm hungry or Juan drinks milk) or an implicit subject (also called an elliptical subject), as would be the case of the following sentences: I'll bring it later or we go to the cinema (in the first sentence the implicit subject is me and in the second it is us).
It should be noted that in some cases we know the subject of the sentence from its context, as for example in the compound sentence "She will pick up your suitcase tomorrow, it was red, right?" the verb form was refers to the suitcase, which acts as an implicit subject.
In some sentences the subject is not a noun or a pronoun, but a collective subject is used (for example, in the sentence "a crowd went to the party", a crowd has the function of a subject).
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