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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 ...
In linguistics, head directionality is a proposed parameter that classifies languages according to whether they are head-initial (the head of a phrase precedes its complements) or head-final (the head follows its complements).
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]
For example, the position of heads in phrases is determined by a parameter. 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 ).
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.
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 ...
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 ]
Example (2)in English "eat an apple", [VP [V eat][DP an apple]] is used in Fukui's article to contrast with Japanese as an example of head initial vs. head final languages. It is actually the same in English as in German in this simple VP phrase with one verb part: [ VP [esse][DP einen Apfel]] so that it does not show by itself that German is a ...