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.

Selection is a head property

Abstract: In the present paper we deal with the semantics of prefixation. We will show that prefixes acquire their semantic values in accordance with the meaning of the words which they are attached to. Hence, the choice of a prefix is semantically determined by the base constituent which is generally the head of the complex word. (We assume that the head of a derived word is the constituent passing on categorial and syntactico-semantic information to the derived word.) Whilst we are not ready to dispense with lexical categories as invoked by many scholars — see, among others, Croft (2001); Plag (2004); Di Sciullo (2005) and supporters of Distributed Morphology —, we are sympathetic with recent views grounding word formation on the role of semantics more heavily than in the past.

The vertebrate head-segmented or a single morphogenetic structure?

Abstract: A brief historical review of the discussion and evidence for a segmented head is given. The idea that the head is made up of a number of segments is accepted, and the number of segments is identified as five and one-half. The half is due to the fact that the sclerotomie segments alternate with myotomic ones. If the head is segmented, then structures can be assigned to segments. Several figures and a table summarize these assignments. A segmented head is viewed as part of the hypothesis that the vertebrate arose from a cephalochordate-like ancestor lacking a complex pharynx and having a better developed head.

The Bessie Head—Langston Hughes Correspondence, 1960–1961

Abstract: The following narrative, consisting of a scholarly introduction and then the reproduction of eight letters and one photograph, opens a new window onto the life and career of the Botswana writer Bessie Head (1937–1986), known for her psychologically charged portraits of Southern African society. Though South African by birth, Head fled to Botswana in 1964 at age twenty-six and lived there for the rest of her life. Essentially all of Bessie Head’s mature published writings, and all of what she is famed for, are set in Botswana, most notably her adopted rural hometown of Serowe. Yet all of her writings were profoundly inflected by her damaging upbringing in a brutally racialized South Africa, which accorded mixed-race persons such as Head a particularly fraught social and psychological status. As Head’s major biographer Gillian Stead Eilersen has noted, little paper documentation other than some published magazine and newspaper journalism exists for Head’s life prior to 1963, when friends and colleagues began to preserve her correspondence.1 The eight letters published here push back the horizon of access to Bessie Head’s private thoughts by three years, to October 1960, when as a young, single, struggling Cape Town writer, she initiated correspondence with the great African American poet Langston Hughes (1902–1967), who was thirty-five years her senior. It is hoped that these letters, and the scholarly introduction that precedes them, will shed valuable light onto this important Botswana writer, and more broadly onto global interactions in the Black Atlantic world.