Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-skm99 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-27T13:26:23.462Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Zwicky on heads1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Richard A. Hudson
Richard A. Hudson
Affiliation:
Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

An interesting development in the last decade or so has been the increasing use that theoretical linguists have made of the notion ‘head’ – or rather, in order not to beg the question, of notions to which they have given the name ‘head’. The term has been around for a long time in linguistics, of course – for example Bloomfield uses it in relation to endocentric constructions (1933: 195), where the head is the daughter constituent which has the same distribution as the mother. Before that, Sweet had used ‘head-word’ to refer to any word to which another is subordinate (1891: 16, quoted in Matthews, 1981: 165). However, theoretical linguists made very little use of the term, or of the constellation of associated concepts, until quite recently. Its present status is due largely to work on X-bar syntax dating from Chomsky (1970), and especially to its recent manifestation in Generalised Phrase Structure Grammar (Gazdar & Pullum, 1981; Gazdar et al., 1985)–and even more so in the ‘head-driven’ variant of this (Pollard, 1985). But the improved status of ‘head’ is also due to some extent to the renewed interest in dependency grammar (Anderson, 1971, 1977; Matthews, 1981; Atkinson, et al, 1982; Hudson, 1984; Nichols, 1986). All these treatments agree not only in using the term ‘head’, but also in using it to refer to the element in some construction to which all the other parts of that construction are (in some sense) subordinate.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 1987 , pp. 109 - 132
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Anderson, J. M. (1971). The grammar of case: towards a localistic theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Anderson, J. M. (1976). On serialization in English syntax. Ludwigsburg: Ludwigsburg University.Google Scholar
Anderson, J. M. (1977). On case grammar. Prolegomena to a theory of grammatical relations. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Anderson, J. M. & Durand, J. (1986). Dependency phonology. In Durand, J. (ed.), Dependency and non-linear phonology. London: Croom Helm. 1–54.Google Scholar
Atkinson, M., Kilby, D. & Roca, I. (1982). Foundations of general linguistics. London: Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Bloomfield, L. (1933). Language. London: Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Bresnan, J. (1982a). Control and complementation. In Bresnan, J. (ed.) 1982b. 282–390.Google Scholar
Bresnan, J. (ed.) (1982b). The mental representation of grammatical relations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1970). Remarks on nominalization. In Jacobs, R. A. & Rosenbaum, P. S. (eds), Readings in English transformational grammar. London: Ginn. 184–221.Google Scholar
Durand, J. (ed.) (1986). Dependency and non-linear phonology. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Fillmore, C. J. (1986). ‘U’-semantics, second round. Quaderni di Semantica 7, 49–58.Google Scholar
Gazdar, G., Klein, E., Pullum, G. & Sag, I. (1985). Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Gazdar, G. & Pullum, G. (1981). Subcategorization, constituent order and the notion ‘head’. In Moortgat, M., Hulst, H. v.d. & Hockstra, T. (eds), The scope of lexical rules. Dordrecht: Foris, 107–123.Google Scholar
Hudson, R. A. (1984). Word grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Hudson, R. A. (1985a). Grammatical relations. Mimeo.Google Scholar
Hudson, R. A. (1985b). The limits of subcategorisation. Linguistic Analysis 15. 233–255.Google Scholar
Hudson, R. A. (1986). The Comp-trace and that-trace effects. Mimeo.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, R. (1983). Semantics and cognition. Canbridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Jacobs, R. A. & Rosenbaum, P. S. (eds). (1970). Readings in English transformational grammar. London: Ginn.Google Scholar
Kaplan, R. & Bresnan, J. (1982). Lexical-functional grammar: a formal system for grammatical representation. In Bresnan, J. (ed.), The mental representation of grammatical relations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 173–281.Google Scholar
Matthews, P. H. (1981). Syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Moortgat, M., Hulst, H.V.D. & Hoekstra, T. (eds) (1981). The scope of lexical rules. Dordrecht: Foris.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nichols, J. (1986). Head-marking and dependent-marking grammar. Lg 62. 56–119.Google Scholar
Pollard, C. J. (1985). Phrase structure grammars without metarules. To appear in Proceedings of the Fourth West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. Stanford: Stanford University Linguistics Department.Google Scholar
Postal, P. M. (1966). On so-called ‘pronouns’ in English. In Reibel, D. & Schane, S. (eds) (1966).Google Scholar
Reibel, D. & Schane, S. (eds). (1966). Modern studies in English. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Robinson, J. J. (1970). Dependency structures and transformational rules. Lg 46. 259–285.Google Scholar
Sommerstein, A. R. (1972). On the so-called definite article in English. LIn 3. 197–209.Google Scholar
Sweet, H. (1891). A new English grammar, logical and historical, vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tesnière, L. (1959). Eléments de syntaxe structurale. Paris: Klincksieck.Google Scholar
Zwicky, A. (1978). Arguing for constituents. Proceedings of the 14th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society. 503–512.Google Scholar
Zwicky, A. (1985a). Heads. JL 21. 1–30.Google Scholar
Zwicky, A. (1985b). Clitics and particles. Lg 61. 283–305.Google Scholar