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.

The Relation between Gender and Number Agreement Processing

Abstract: We report an experiment in which we test the relationship between gender and number in subject-predicate agreement. We also test the link between two different number-agreement relations—subject-verb and subject-predicative adjective. Participants saw first an unmarked adjective and then a sentence fragment consisting of a complex subject with a head noun and a modifier containing a second noun and were asked to make a whole sentence using the adjective with the proper gender and number markings. The gender of the subject head and the gender and number of the attractor noun were manipulated. Number errors in the verb and number and gender errors in the predicative adjective were measured. The results suggest gender agreement is computed independently of number agreement. In contrast, subject-verb number agreement and subject-predicative adjective number agreement are a unitary process. The implications for psycholinguistic and linguistic theories of gender and number are discussed.

Relabeling Heads: A Unified Account for Relativization Structures

Abstract: A tenet of any version of phrase structure theory is that a lexical item can transmit its label when merged with another category. We assume that if it is internally merged, a lexical item can turn a clause into a nominal phrase. If the relabeling lexical item is a wh-word, a free relative results; if it is an N, a full relative results; if it is a non-wh D, a pseudorelative results. It follows that the head of a relative construction cannot be more complex than a lexical item. We show massive evidence that when it is otherwise (e.g., the book about Obama that you bought), the modifier is late-merged after the noun has moved and relabeled the structure.

Two Types of Head Movement in Romance

Abstract: Introduction The basic point of this paper is to argue that there are two distinct kinds of head movement. One kind is triggered by morphological properties of the host head, while the other kind is not, and in fact often appears to be triggered by some property of the moved head. Adopting and extending the terminology of Chomsky & Lasnik (1991), we refer to the former as L-related head movement and the latter as non-L-related head movement. Both types of head movement are subject to the ECP, but, since the nature of the target of movement is different in each case, the antecedent-government requirement manifests itself in different ways. This gives the appearance of differing locality conditions; in particular, only L-related head movement obeys the “classical” Head Movement Constraint of Travis (1984). By a revision of the Relativized Minimality Condition of Rizzi (1990b), however, we see that both the cases which obey this condition and those which do not are in conformity with the ECP. We assume a conjunctive formulation of the ECP, as in Rizzi (1990b: chapter 2). Moreover, we assume that traces of head movement are subject to a uniform head-government requirement. For non-L-related head movement, this raises the possibility that the head-governor and the antecedent-governor may be distinct. Our main empirical argument for the framework to be adopted relies on this fact; we will show that there is diachronic evidence from French that non-finite AGR ceased to be a head-governor for head traces in the 17th century, with the result that a number of instances of non-L-related head movement disappeared together.

Head Position and Internally Headed Relative Clauses.

Abstract: This article examines the phenomenon of HEAD MOVEMENT in internally headed relative clauses (IHRCs). Most theorists working in a transformational framework consider the internal head to move to an external position. I show that in some cases, head movement to an external position need not take place; an internal head may move but remain within the sentence itself. I show that this movement of the head to a sentence-internal position is a consequence of (1) the quantificational nature of IHRCs and (2) the mapping hypothesis of Diesing (1990, 1992a,b).*

The syntax of English genitive constructions

Abstract: As is well known, English has two genitive or possessive constructions, the ‘proposed’ and the ‘postposed’, exemplified in (1).In each case we have an NP, with a head N (book, office, dog, house, plants) modified by a possessive expression (John's, a man's, mine, etc.). This expression is itself an NP in the genitive Case, and I shall refer to it as the ‘genitive phrase’. By contrast with other familiar languages more highly inflected than English, genitive Case is hot marked by an inflection on the head of a genitive phrase, but by the clitic ’s, which is attached right at the end of the phrase. The exception is where the genitive phrase is not a full NP but a personal pronoun, in which case we get an inflected form (irregular in pattern) as in these other languages: I - my/mine, he - his, etc. These possessive forms of pronouns have almost identical distribution to that of full NPs in the genitive (there are some differences which I shall point to below), and so it seems clear that they are genitives, despite the morphological difference; personal pronouns are highly irregular morphologically anyway, and not only in English. This is assumed in all recent work I know of, and I shall take it to be uncontroversial.