From reflexive clitic to marker of human impersonal subjects: the Resian reflexive sa

Abstract Like standard Slovenian, Polish, and several Romance languages, the Slovenian dialect of Resia forms impersonal clauses by combining transitive and intransitive verbs with reflexive clitics. Due to their syntactic and semantic properties, these reflexive impersonals have been analyzed as involving a subject with an arbitrary human referent realized by the reflexive clitic. Based on data from a recent translation of The little prince and other Resian resources, this paper brings forward hitherto unnoticed empirical evidence supporting this analysis. Unlike other Slavic languages, Resian has developed a set of subject clitics whose position in the clause differs from that of object clitics. Interestingly, when forming impersonal constructions, reflexive clitics are placed like subject clitics and not like object clitics as they are in other contexts. Furthermore, the distribution of the reflexive clitic variants se and sa in The little prince suggests that the latter is becoming the sole impersonal marker while the former is used to express all other reflexive meanings. This implies that sa is developing into a separate subject clitic. The general significance of these findings lies in the fact that they demonstrate a link between impersonal reflexives and subjects which does not depend on the assumption of a specific theoretical framework.