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.

Misinterpretations in agreement and agreement attraction

Abstract: It has been well established that subject–verb number agreement can be disrupted by local noun phrases that differ in number from the subject head noun phrase. In sentence production, mismatches in the grammatical number of the head and local noun phrases lead to agreement errors on the verb as in: the key to the cabinets are. Similarly, although ungrammaticality typically causes disruption in measures of sentence comprehension, the disruption is reduced when the local noun phrase has a plural feature. Using a forced-choice comprehension question method, we report two experiments that provide evidence that comprehenders were likely to misinterpret the number information on the head noun phrase when morphosyntactic number markings on the local noun phrase and verb did not match the head. These results are consistent with a growing body of research that suggests that comprehenders often arrive at a final interpretation of a sentence that is not faithful to the linguistic input.

Bulgarian preverbs : aspect in phrase structure

Abstract: This paper argues for a syntactic approach to aspectuality, where semantic information about subevent structure is incorporated into the phrase marker. Such an approach would be justified only if aspectual properties present syntactic as well as semantic effects. It is the aim of the paper to present evidence of such syntactic effects. Slavic preverbs have standardly been regarded as perfectivizing (or telicity-marking) morphemes. It will be argued that preverbs are also causative morphemes. As such, they are situated in the upper part of a VP-layer structure, a light verb widely accepted to be reserved for CAUSE. In English, the aspectual interpretation of a terminative or durative event depends on the specified or unspecified cardinality of the object (Verkuyl 1993) and aspect is calculated in a functional projection AspP between the two VP layers (Travis 1991). In Slavic, on the other hand, it is the presence or absence of a preverb in the upper verbal head that encodes a terminative or a durative interpretation. This contrast is explained with the relatively higher structural position of Slavic preverbs with respect to the functional projection AspP in English. Similar scope effects are demonstrated with articles in Russian, with interpretations of Polish and English imperfective sentences, and with manner adverbs in Bulgarian