Costruzioni esperienziali con esperiente in accusativo nelle lingue slave meridionali

In this paper we take into account an impersonal copular construction conveying emotional states in some South Slavic languages, namely Bulgarian, Serbo-Croat (Croat, Bosnian, Montenegrin and Serb), and Slovene. This construction features an Accusative-marked Experiencer and a noun with a (seemingly) predicative function realized as a syntactic subject and expressing the emotion felt. Drawing on the available diachronic data, we attempt to reconstruct the development of this peculiar pattern and compare it with equifunctional constructions in Eastern and Western Slavic languages, which however exhibit a Dative Experiencer. We also offer a cross-linguistic survey of similar impersonal constructions as they are attested in a number of ancient Indo-European languages and argue that they should be interpreted in terms of residual patterns that remount to a prehistoric stage where some domains of the grammar where organized on the basis of active patterns of alignment.