Source-based generalizations vs. productbased generalizations in syntax
In the present article, I demonstrate that the notion of source- oriented vs. product-oriented generalizations, introduced by Joan Bybee (1995), can be applied to syntax. To show this, I examine the syntactic behavior of Russian verbs with some markers and in some constructions (verbs derived by means of prefixes like раз- and circumfixes like раз-…-ся, до-…-ся and so on; various uses of the reflexive marker -ся. The conclu- sion is that some syntactic processes change the syntactic structure of the base verb in one predictable way (here belong, for instance, anticausa- tives, such as разбиться ‘break (intr)’, derived from разбить ‘break (tr)’. By contrast, other processes are aimed to derive one particular syn- tactic structure, irrespectively of how it is related to the syntactic structure of the base verb. For instance, most uses of the prefix раз- tend to form either transitive or reflexive verbs, and it is irrelevant whether the base verb is transitive or intransitive, reflexive or non-reflexive.Importantly, not all cases of syntactic derivation show a clear-cutdistinction between the two types of generalizations. For description of some phenomena, both source- and product-oriented generalizations must be used: these are phenomena which are restricted both by the properties of the base verb and the requirement to build a particular output structure.