The paper is devoted to a family of constructions in Czech and Italian that are reminiscent of the verbal category of Indo-European Middle, which, besides the active voice, was the second voice and expressed agency/state as subjective. As far as Czech is concerned, we consider two constructions, one with intransitive verbs, the morpheme “se”, the adverb of evaluation and the Experiencer expressed in the dative, and one with transitive verbs, the so-called mediopassive, with the Patient in subject position as in the passive sentences. As far as Italian is concerned, we also analyze two constructions, one with intransitive verbs and the combined clitics “se+ne” and one with transitive verbs and the adverb of evaluation “facilmente”. Based on data derived from the Czech Ten Ten 2017 corpus, as well as the Italian web 2020 corpus from the Sketch Engine platform, we analyze the actional nature of the verbs occurring in the sentences, while contrasting the functions of the constructions in the two languages in the framework of construction grammar (Goldberg, 1995).
