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.

Understanding Karma Police: The Perceived Plausibility of Noun Compounds as Predicted by Distributional Models of Semantic Representation

Abstract: Noun compounds, consisting of two nouns (the head and the modifier) that are combined into a single concept, differ in terms of their plausibility: school bus is a more plausible compound than saddle olive. The present study investigates which factors influence the plausibility of attested and novel noun compounds. Distributional Semantic Models (DSMs) are used to obtain formal (vector) representations of word meanings, and compositional methods in DSMs are employed to obtain such representations for noun compounds. From these representations, different plausibility measures are computed. Three of those measures contribute in predicting the plausibility of noun compounds: The relatedness between the meaning of the head noun and the compound (Head Proximity), the relatedness between the meaning of modifier noun and the compound (Modifier Proximity), and the similarity between the head noun and the modifier noun (Constituent Similarity). We find non-linear interactions between Head Proximity and Modifier Proximity, as well as between Modifier Proximity and Constituent Similarity. Furthermore, Constituent Similarity interacts non-linearly with the familiarity with the compound. These results suggest that a compound is perceived as more plausible if it can be categorized as an instance of the category denoted by the head noun, if the contribution of the modifier to the compound meaning is clear but not redundant, and if the constituents are sufficiently similar in cases where this contribution is not clear. Furthermore, compounds are perceived to be more plausible if they are more familiar, but mostly for cases where the relation between the constituents is less clear.

Phrase Structure and Directionality in Irish.

Abstract: In recent years the study of phrase structure has largely become a search for principles, parameters and other mechanisms to replace phrase-structure rules of the traditional sort. For capturing word order, one of the most common devices is the directionality parameter, especially the one which specifies a language as head-final or head-initial. It has also been proposed that languages may be specified for the direction of government (Stowell, 1981), or direction of Case- and theta-role assignment (Koopman, 1983; Travis, 1984). Often, such proposals focus only on the lowest (X′) level of phrase structure, that is to say the ordering of complements with relation to a head, but there have also been suggestions for directionality of specifiers or adjuncts (as in Ernst, 1989; Georgopoulos, 1991).

Proxy Categories in Phrase Structure Theory and the Chinese VP

Abstract: The present article discusses in detail the so-called verb-copying construction in Mandarin Chinese. Applying Nash & Rouveret's (1997, 2002) theory of proxy categories, we obtain an analysis which is completely different from the standard one (cf. Huang 1982) and which, as a consequence, proposes a new account of aspect in Chinese. The baconstruction is re-examined as well and ba is shown to be a higher (verbal) head rather than a preposition.

Thinking in the right direction: An ellipsis analysis of right-dislocation

Abstract: We propose to analyze right-dislocation constructions in terms of clausal coordination, coupled with ellipsis. While neither rightward movement nor base-generation of backgrounded and afterthought phrases is descriptively accurate, we show that the facts follow straightforwardly on an analysis that takes the dislocated phrase to be the surface remnant of a second clause that is underlyingly parallel to the host clause and reduced by ellipsis at PF. Right-dislocated XPs are thus theoretically assimilated to sluiced wh-phrases, fragment answers, and other sentential fragments. We furthermore suggest that the two clauses in right-dislocation are syntactically related by an abstract coordinating head, making right-dislocation an instance of specifying coordination.