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The four trees above show a head-final structure. The following trees illustrate head-final structures further as well as head-initial and head-medial structures. The constituency trees (= a-trees) appear on the left, and dependency trees (= b-trees) on the right. Henceforth the convention is employed where the words appear as the labels on the ...
A head-complement order is called a head-initial structure, while a complement-head order is called a head-final structure. These are special cases of Tesnière's centripetal and centrifugal structures, since here only complements are considered, whereas Tesnière considered all types of dependents.
The direction of branching reflects the position of heads in phrases, and in this regard, right-branching structures are head-initial, whereas left-branching structures are head-final. [2] English has both right-branching (head-initial) and left-branching (head-final) structures, although it is more right-branching than left-branching. [3]
Whether a language is head-initial or head-final is regarded as a parameter which is either on or off for particular languages (i.e. English is head-initial, whereas Japanese is head-final). Principles and parameters was largely formulated by the linguists Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik. Many linguists have worked within this framework, and for ...
An adpositional phrase is a syntactic category that includes prepositional phrases, postpositional phrases, and circumpositional phrases. [1] Adpositional phrases contain an adposition (preposition, postposition, or circumposition) as head and usually a complement such as a noun phrase.
A language is head-marking if the grammatical marks showing agreement between different words of a phrase tend to be placed on the heads (or nuclei) of phrases, rather than on the modifiers or dependents. Many languages employ both head-marking and dependent-marking, and some languages double up and are thus double-marking.
Head-initial languages will have the head precede the complement, like in English. Head-final languages, like Japanese and Korean, have the head following the complement. In this way, X-bar theory allows for variation across languages with some having an SOV (subject, object, verb) order while others have an SVO order. [ 3 ]
Whether a language has primarily prepositions or postpositions is seen as an aspect of its typological classification, and tends to correlate with other properties related to head directionality. Since an adposition is regarded as the head of its phrase, prepositional phrases are head-initial (or right- branching ), while postpositional phrases ...