In the literary language and the majority of the dialects, for the first person of the perfect/unwitnessed past an impersonal construction is preferred. It consists of the genitive form of the personal pronoun/animate noun and the participle-based form with the 3rd person reflexive suffix — s'"oma. The meaning of the construction is always that of an involuntary or non-conscious action:

The construction is specialized for the meaning of involuntary action in other tenses as well, and has parallels in other Finno-Ugric languages in that the demotion of the subject (nominative), adding a reflexive suffix (in Finnish, a causative suffix), the directionality, controllability of the action is cancelled. Unplanned actions are often expressed by this construction:

There is another usage for the reflexive forms. In grammars, it is presented separately as an Aktionsart which expresses finality, exhaustiveness, apparently in all tenses:

In Komi-Zyryan, a development seems to be taking place which is very natural, and possibly aided by areal influence: the genitive subject appears together with the — oma perfect, which is invariant, that is, impersonal. With transitive verbs, the object is either in the nominative or in the accusative. When nominative, the object can be called a subject, as in other languages which express their perfects with habere verbs:

The accusative object also produces a resulting state interpretation:

Note that the corresponding grammatical construction is found, though rarely, in the surrounding north Russian dialects, which use a locative possessor with accusative object and a past participle predicative form:

While it is difficult, if not impossible, to decide whether any areal influence is at work here, we may note that in Komi, there is a construction with the genitive as an agent of participial attributive forms:

In present-day Komi, the genitive seems to have been replaced by the instrumental everywhere, but the former usage can be found in the texts of certain writers; it appeared in the spontaneous dialectal speech in the 1940s as well:

In other non-finite verbal constructions as well, as in gerundials, the genitive may express the agent of the action [Fedjunjova 1998].

With certain verbs, the genitive expresses the non-active subject, as with the verbs byrny «to be finished», vunny «to be forgotten»: menam vun"oma I-GEN forget-PERF-3SG «I have forgotten» [Fedina 1997:10]. All these usages may have served as analogical basis for the possessive impersonal with — "oma. |