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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.
Professor Whitney in his Essentials of English Grammar recommends the German original stating "there is an English version, but it is hardly to be used." (p. vi) Meyer-Myklestad, J. (1967). An Advanced English Grammar for Students and Teachers. Universitetsforlaget-Oslo. p. 627. Morenberg, Max (2002). Doing Grammar, 3rd edition. New York ...
In linguistics, the head or nucleus of a phrase is the word that determines the syntactic category of that phrase. For example, the head of the noun phrase boiling hot water is the noun (head noun) water. Analogously, the head of a compound is the stem that determines the semantic category of that compound.
The distinguishing characteristic of an attributive adjective phrase is that it appears inside the noun phrase that it modifies. [2] An interesting trait of these phrases in English is that an attributive adjective alone generally precedes the noun, e.g. a proud man, whereas a head-initial or head-medial adjective phrase follows its noun, e.g. a man proud of his children. [3]
Other theories (both constituency- and dependency-based ones), e.g. early Transformational Grammar, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Meaning-Text Theory, Word Grammar, etc. allow for n-ary branching. This distinction can have a profound impact on the overall nature of the theory of syntax.
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English is considered to be mainly head-initial (verbs precede their objects, for example), while Japanese is an example of a language that is consistently head-final. In certain other languages, such as German and Gbe, examples of both types of head directionality occur. Various theories have been proposed to explain such variation.