Although the reflexive clitic pronoun se is a common feature in middle contexts in Ibero-Romance languages, in Asturian — a minority language in Northwestern Spain — it is said to be optional: esti pan esmigáya(se) fácil; 'this bread crumbles easily'. Data from middle sentences containing change of state predicates show that the presence of se in these structures is tied to the projection of a passive Voice head encoding the participation of generic implicit external argument in the event, therefore giving rise to a generic se-passive configuration. On the other hand, the se-less counterpart is non-agentive, lacks Voice, and is therefore a generic anticausative structure. These two derivations are also available in the other Ibero-Romance languages, such as Spanish or Catalan, the only difference being that, in the latter, se may also spell out v° in anticausative contexts. Additionally, these contexts allow the insertion of a non-core dative argument by means of an affected applicative head (Cuervo 2003), whose interpretation ranges from unintentional causer of the change of state, to affected by the theme's resulting state, depending on the position Appl occupies in the derivation; thus, the unintentional causer reading arises when Appl merges above vP, and the affected one when Appl merges below it. Crucially, the unintentional causer interpretation is only possible in the se-less variant of Asturian middle passives containing a change of state predicate, i.e., in the generic anticausative structure, where there is no Voice, and the position atop vP is available for Appl to occupy. Nonetheless, should a Voice head be present in the Numeration, it will sit on top of vP leaving no choice for Appl but to merge below it, and therefore its only possible reading will be that of affected by an externally caused event. The mutual incompatibility between Voice and a high applicative head in generic se-passives in these languages can be explained if both of these projections are different instances of i* (Wood & Marantz 2017), i.e., an argument-introducing functional head whose realization is contingent on its surrounding environment. Thus i* surfaces as Voice when its complement is a causative vP (vDO, in Cuervo's terms), and as Appl when it embeds an inchoative one (vGO).