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.

Acquisition of Sentence-Final Particles in Japanese

Abstract: Typologically, Japanese is an SOV language, and shows many of the grammatical features of this category (Clancy, 1985). For example, the Japanese language makes use of postpositional particles rather than prepositions, verbs precede tense markers, and nominal modifiers precede head nouns as follows: Naomi-SUBJ write PAST book-OBJ Ken-IOBJ hand PAST “Naomi handed Ken a book which she wrote.” (1) Naomi-ga kai-ta hon-o Ken-ni watashi-ta.

The Relationship between Movements and Positions of the Head and the Torso in Finnish Sign Language

Abstract: Abstract:This article discusses a study of the relationship between movements of the head and the torso in Finnish Sign Language (FinSL). It describes the differences and similarities in the articulation of these two body parts in FinSL narratives, and discusses the status and relationship of the head and the torso as articulators in sign languages. The study reveals that, in FinSL narratives, the head is clearly more active than the torso. When both the torso and the head moved, almost half of the co-occurrences were found to be simple combinations of codirectional movements, while slightly more than half of the co- occurrences were semicomplex or complex combinations with differences in the direction of the movements. Most of the co- occurring torso and head movements shared the same function, regardless of the degree of complexity of the combination. However, differences in the functions of torso and head movements were found to increase as the complexity of the combined movements grew.

Morphological word structure in English and Swedish: the evidence from prosody

Abstract: Trubetzkoy's recognition of a delimitative function of phonology, serving to signal boundaries between morphological units, is expressed in terms of alignment constraints in Optimality Theory, where the relevant constraints require specific morphological boundaries to coincide with phonological structure (Trubetzkoy 1936, 1939, McCarthy & Prince 1993). The approach pursued in the present article is to investigate the distribution of phonological boundary signals to gain insight into the criteria underlying morphological analysis. The evidence from English and Swedish suggests that necessary and sufficient conditions for word-internal morphological analysis concern the recognizability of head constituents, which include the rightmost members of compounds and head affixes. The claim is that the stability of word-internal boundary effects in historical perspective cannot in general be sufficiently explained in terms of memorization and imitation of phonological word form. Rather, these effects indicate a morphological parsing mechanism based on the recognition of word-internal head constituents. Head affixes can be shown to contrast systematically with modifying affixes with respect to syntactic function, semantic content, and prosodic properties. That is, head affixes, which cannot be omitted, often lack inherent meaning and have relatively unmarked boundaries, which can be obscured entirely under specific phonological conditions. By contrast, modifying affixes, which can be omitted, consistently have inherent meaning and have stronger boundaries, which resist prosodic fusion in all phonological contexts. While these correlations are hardly specific to English and Swedish it remains to be investigated to which extent they hold cross-linguistically. The observation that some of the constituents identified on the basis of prosodic evidence lack inherent meaning raises the issue of compositionality. I will argue that certain systematic aspects of word meaning cannot be captured with reference to the syntagmatic level, but require reference to the paradigmatic level instead. The assumption is then that there are two dimensions of morphological analysis: syntagmatic analysis, which centers on the criteria for decomposing words in terms of labelled constituents, and paradigmatic analysis, which centers on the criteria for establishing relations among (whole) words in the mental lexicon. While meaning is intrinsically connected with paradigmatic analysis (e.g. base relations, oppositeness) it is not essential to syntagmatic analysis.

Between Shifts and Alternations: Ditransitive Constructions

Abstract: In this paper I present two classes of double object constructions in Modern Greek, i.e., the genitive, as well as the double accusative, ditransitive constructions. I show that these two classes differ from one another in that not both of them permit derivational processes such as the formation of adjectival passives. I also look at the case properties associated with the verbs which head Modern Greek genitive and double accusative ditransitive constructions. Finally, the analysis I propose for these constructions in Modern Greek are formalized using the Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS) framework of Copestake et al. (2001) and Copestake et al. (2003).