Head (linguistics)

About: Head (linguistics) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2540 publications have been published within this topic receiving 29023 citations. The topic is also known as: nucleus.

Lexical decision in sentences: Effects of syntactic structure

Abstract: A lexical decision paradigm was used to examine syntactic influence on word recognition in sentences. Initial fragments of sentences were presented visually (CRT display) one word at a time (at reading speeds), from left to right. The string terminated with the appearance of a lexical decision target. The grammatical structure of the incomplete sentence affected lexical decision reaction time (RT). In Experiment 1, modal verb contexts followed by main verb targets and preposition contexts followed by noun targets produced lower RTs than did the opposite pairings (i.e., modal/noun and preposition/verb). In Experiment 2, transitive verb contexts followed by noun targets and subject noun phrase contexts followed by verb targets yielded lower RTs than did the opposite pairings. Similar contrasts for adjective targets did not yield comparable effects in Experiment 2, but did when the adjective was the head of a predictable phrase (Experiment 4). In Experiment 3, noun targets yielded lower RTs than did verb targets after contexts of a transitive verb followed by a prepositional phrase. An account of these effects is offered in terms of parsing constraints on phrasal categories.

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar Parsing on Penn Treebank

Abstract: Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) enjoys a uniform formalism representing rich contextual syntactic and even semantic meanings. This paper makes the first attempt to formulate a simplified HPSG by integrating constituent and dependency formal representations into head-driven phrase structure. Then two parsing algorithms are respectively proposed for two converted tree representations, division span and joint span. As HPSG encodes both constituent and dependency structure information, the proposed HPSG parsers may be regarded as a sort of joint decoder for both types of structures and thus are evaluated in terms of extracted or converted constituent and dependency parsing trees. Our parser achieves new state-of-the-art performance for both parsing tasks on Penn Treebank (PTB) and Chinese Penn Treebank, verifying the effectiveness of joint learning constituent and dependency structures. In details, we report 95.84 F1 of constituent parsing and 97.00% UAS of dependency parsing on PTB.

The Syntax of Noun Phrases: Configuration, Parameters and Empty Categories

Abstract: Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction 1. On NPs - marking and c-command 2. Extraction form NP and the proper notion of Head government 3. NP parametrization: the Head-Subject hypothesis 4. Null pronominals within NPs and the syntax of DPs References Index.

Determiner Phrase in a Language without Determiners

Abstract: Serbo-Croatian (SC) is a language without articles, probably the only category of speech that has uncontroversially and crosslinguistically been argued to occupy the head of the Determiner Phrase (DP). This paper argues that even SC, a language without articles, projects a DP on top of NPs in argument positions. The strongest evidence comes from noun/pronoun asymmetries, where the pronouns precede, and nouns follow, certain intensifying adjectives. Assuming that these adjectives occupy a fixed syntactic position, the conclusion must be that pronouns occupy a structurally higher position than nouns. Since the evidence of such asymmetries is extremely sparse in the data, the children presumably cannot rely on them to conclude that there is a DP in SC. Since there are also no articles in SC, children have virtually no evidence of the existence of a DP. It must be then that the projection of DPs is a universal property, independent of the presence of the lexical item which solely occupies the head of the projection. Morphological properties of SC pronouns and adjectives actually support the existence of more than just one functional projection in the noun phrase in SC. The paper derives Greenberg's universal 43, which states that pronouns are more likely to have (gender) morphology than nouns, by arguing that pronouns move (overtly) through more functional projections than nouns, and ultimately land in D.

Hand, head and face - negative constructions in sign languages

Abstract: This article presents a typology of negative constructions across a substantial number of sign languages from around the globe. After situating the topic within the wider context of linguistic typology, the main negation strategies found across sign languages are described. Nonmanual negation includes the use of head movements and facial expressions for negation and is of great importance in sign languages as well as particularly interesting from a typological point of view. As far as manual signs are concerned, independent negative particles represent the dominant strategy, but there are also instances of irregular negation in most sign languages. Irregular negatives may take the form of suppletion, cliticisation, affixing, or internal modification of a sign. The results of the study lead to interesting generalisations about similarities and differences between negatives in signed and spoken languages.