How to break three prohibitions at a time: Some remarks on Russian verbs with sam-…-sja.

The paper discusses the fact that Russian forms like samouničtožatsja, samovzryvajuš’ijsja violate three constraints: a) the constraint on complex verb derivation; b) the constraint on subject expression; c) the constraint on discontinuous placement of derivational morphology. The analysis shows that the arguments of compounds cannot bear the agent role. The root sam- (‘self’, emphatic) is often observed in the first part of verbal compounds and is projected here by the reflexives -sja or seb’a. The ability to project its own structure shows that -sja is a head projecting v(oice)P.