Impersonal reflexives in Romance and Slavic: Contact effects in the Balkans

In the well-known analysis of Cinque (1988), the generalization that a language will form impersonal reflexives of unaccusatives if and only if it can have accusative pivots follows from Parameter Theory. But the Balkans provide a two-way exception to this prediction. First, impersonal reflexives of unaccusatives are found in Standard Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian in spite of the fact that these are nominative-pivot languages. Second, in Slovene, impersonal reflexives of unaccusatives are disallowed, even though Slovene has accusative pivots. I offer an areal solution to this problem, suggesting that anomalous languages are affected by features from the Cakavian dialect of Croatian. I furthermore argue that this is possible because of the relative superficial nature of case marking in these languages.