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.

Syntax-Driven Sentence Revision for Broadcast News Summarization

Abstract: We propose a method of revising lead sentences in a news broadcast. Unlike many other methods proposed so far, this method does not use the coreference relation of noun phrases (NPs) but rather, insertion and substitution of the phrases modifying the same head chunk in lead and other sentences. The method borrows an idea from the sentence fusion methods and is more general than those using NP coreferencing as ours includes them. We show in experiments the method was able to find semantically appropriate revisions thus demonstrating its basic feasibility. We also show that that parsing errors mainly degraded the sentential completeness such as grammaticality and redundancy.

On Double-Headedness and the Anatomy of the Clause*

Abstract: We argue that the Minimalist view of phrase structure in Chomsky 1995 should be minimally extended to allow for phrases that have more than one head, so long as the two heads have the same category features and are not attracted by a higher head. This innovation results in an elegant typology of the various kinds of syntactically distinguishable serial verb constructions (SVCs) found in Edo and related West African languages, as discovered by Stewart (1998). In particular, we claim that the different SVCs come from different choices of which phrase in the clausal structure is doubly headed: Voice, light v, or V. Moreover, details of Edo syntax allow us to make some refinements to the theory of clause structure; these include showing that Kratzer’s Voice head is distinct from Chomsky’s v head, and showing exactly where agents, themes and goal phrases are generated. Empirical evidence for our claims comes from a variety of syntactic and semantic sources, but especially from the position and interpretation of various classes of adverbs.

The distribution of double determiners in swedish: den support in d*

Abstract: . This article examines the distribution of the double definiteness construction in Swedish, where definite noun phrases appear with both a pre-nominal definite article and a post-nominal suffixal definite article. It is argued that the prenominal article is inserted to support features in D° only when the head noun plus the suffixal article cannot raise into D° and support the features there. The head noun fails to raise to D° in three contexts: in emphatic expressions, where the suffixal article cannot support the emphasis at PF; with pre-nominal adjectives, where N° remains in situ to license adjectival inflection and where there is an intervening head that prevents the head noun from raising to D°.

Adjectives in Modern Greek : an instance of predication, or an old issue revisited

Abstract: In the present article the problem of the position of the adjectives in the noun phrase in Modern Greek is addressed Rather than starting from their alleged ‘asymmetrical’ distribution, according to which postnominal adjectives are only allowed in indefinite DPs, I concentrate on the possible interpretations that the adjective can have relative to the noun The differences between prenominal and apparently postnominal adjectives in indefinite DPs suggest a predicative reading of the latter This semantic account motivates a corresponding syntactic one, according to which the noun moving upwards to a head DEF, formally distinct from D, enters a predicative relationship with the AP generated uniquely prenominally Such a movement is precluded in definite DPs, because the DEF position is occupied by the definite article In this way, a number of differences observed between definite and indefinite NPs, as far as ‘postnominal’ adjectives are concerned, are seen as consequences of their predicative nature and the way this interacts with the definiteness/indefiniteness of what serves as their subject