Grammatical encoding of agency in Asturian middle constructions

Middle-passive constructions in Asturian –a Romance language spoken in the diglossic region of Asturias, in northern Spain– appear to optionally allow the occurrence of the reflexive pronoun se in them; this has been traditionally considered a pleonastic use of the reflexive due to the influence of Spanish, i.e. the dominant language in the territory (ALLA 2001). Here, I show that the presence of such pronoun is neither aspectual nor stylistic; instead, I argue that this clitic spells out a passivized Voice head encoding the participation of an implicit generic agent/experiencer in the event, i.e. a generic passive construction. The non-pronominal variant, on the contrary, is only possible with unaccusative verbs or those undergoing the causative alternation, i.e. in inchoative configurations, which can be generic. Evidence for this claim is that only the pronominal counterpart can control into a purpose clause but does not license the insertion of the PP por sí mesmu (‘by itself’), and vice versa. Additionally, these structures can host an additional dative argument which can only be interpreted as an unintentional causer of the event in absence of the reflexive, therefore supporting Suárez-Palma’s (2020) claim that there exists a mutual incompatibility between Voice and a high applicative head –both different realizations of i* (Wood & Marantz 2017)–, which compete for the position above the verbalizing head in generic passives. Finally, cases of linguistic transfer between Asturian and Asturian Spanish are discussed.