Journal of Historical Linguistics 3:1 (2013), 7–27. doi 10.1075/jhl.3.1.02cot issn 2210–2116 / e-issn 2210-2124 © John Benjamins Publishing Company Reconstructing Proto-Indo-European categories Te refexive and the middle in Hittite and in the Proto-language* Paola Cotticelli Kurras and Alfredo Rizza University of Verona & University of Würzburg Starting from the analysis of constructions employed to express the category of refexive in Hittite, encoded both by the verbal ending set of the middle and by the pronominal marker -za with both active and middle verbal forms, we present a typological parallelism with the Baltic languages that has consistently developed, from a pronominal, a verbal strategy to mark refexivity. It is also shown that a development regarding the ways of encoding refexivity involve other Indo-European languages as well. Te Anatolian languages attest the refexes of the original set of endings referring to the semantic categories of Refexive, Middle and “Resultative”, while the other Indo-European languages attest an innovated “mixed morphology” for the category of Middle and Refexive as opposed to the proper endings of the historical perfect. Within such a theoretical framework, the development of al- ternative strategies, using pronominal devices or particles, aims to disambiguate a wide polysemous ending set. A ‘Wackernagel’ (2P) particle in Hittite, namely -z, is particularly active in disambiguating refexivity. Lithuanian -si, an original pronoun that developed at frst into a 2P particle and subsequently into a verbal sufx, extends its functional feld and takes over the place of the original middle, as in other Baltic and Slavonic languages. Keywords: Hittite particle -za, Baltic sufx -si, Proto-Indo-European verbal system, middle, refexive category 1. Introduction Recent studies consider similar semantic extensions for the categories of middle voice (Kemmer 1993) and refexive (Geniušiene 1987). Tus the so-called ‘middle voice’ and the ‘refexive’ may be diferent labels referring to morphological means