elemtilas wrote: ↑29 Nov 2017 18:01
gestaltist wrote: ↑29 Nov 2017 12:51
The adposition is the head of the adpositional phrase. AFAIK, head-initial languages tend to have prepositions, and head-final - postpositions. SOV languages tend to have postpositions.
So it's not the noun (or verb) that's the "head"?? That seems a bit confusing!
There are competing definitions for "head"; or, rather, it's probably more profitable to believe "head word of a phrase" is a polysemous term in linguistics, like "theme".
I re-select the definition I'm going to use for each conlang.
For Arpien, the definition is:
"The head word of a phrase is the word that determines which distributional class ('part-of-speech') the other word(s) of the phrase must come from, and the distributional class the entire phrase will have."
That means, among other things, that adpositions are the heads of adpositional phrases.
Edit: The other constituent of the adpositional phrase must be a noun-phrase; and the entire adpositional phrase acts like either an adverb phrase or an adjective phrase.
It also means that in the phrase "red apple" the head word is "red".
Edit: Because "red" is an adjective, the phrase "red X" is grammatical only when X is a noun-phrase; and then the whole phrase "red X" acts like a noun-phrase.
For some uses, some grammarians say the "head word" is the one which has the same distributional class as the entire phrase;
when using "head word" that way when using that definition of "head-word", they'd say "apple" is the head-word of "red apple".
For my grammar of Arpien, however, that creates a problem, because it would mean most types of phrases don't have head-words.
(Because for most production rules of Arpien, the first constituent and the last constituent and the entire phrase are from three different "parts-of-speech" or "word-classes" or distributional classes.)
Edit: By using the definition I mentioned above for Arpien, I got its grammar to be relentlessly head-final.
In fact, I prefer the definition I just stated when talking about "head-initial" vs "head-final" word-order, of any language, not just my conlang Arpien.
But perhaps a different definition would be preferable when talking about "head-marking" vs "dependent-marking"? Or other linguisticish things we use the word "head" when talking about?
Edit: For instance, if I am not mistaken (and I could be!),
usually when possessive phrases mark the possessor in the genitive case and leave the possessum unmarked, they are said to be "dependent-marked";
but when possessive phrases leave the possessor unmarked, but mark the possessum in the construct state, they are said to be "head-marked".