Abstract
The study investigates the patterning of headedness in compounding, in particular the patterning of regularities and exceptions to the Right-Hand Head Rule (RHHR). An examination of the grammatical descriptions of compounds in English, French, Italian, German, Arabic, Hebrew, Dutch and Spanish indicates that languages such as German and Dutch are strongly right-headed, other languages such as French and Arabic are strongly left-headed, whereas English, Spanish and Italian tend to be mixed between left-headed and right-headed. Despite the existence of some exceptions to RHHR in some of these languages, the rule remains viable, as these exceptions may have a systematic pattern. While in Romance languages the exceptions seem to be phonologically conditioned, in Germanic languages the exceptions appear to be syntactically conditioned. This study raises the question whether internal headedness in a language could be regarded as a fairly arbitrary property, unconnected to the language’s other characteristics, or not.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Editorial Note
- Editorial
- Phonetics & Phonology
- Antonym adjective pairs and prosodic iconicity: evidence from letter replications in an English blogger corpus
- Is there phonological feature priming?
- Automated tableau generation using SPOT (Syntax Prosody in Optimality Theory)
- The effect of prosodic focus varies by phrasal tones: the case of South Kyungsang Korean
- Morphology & Syntax
- A cross-linguistic perspective on the Right-Hand Head Rule: the rule and the exceptions
- Cross-linguistic evidence for cognitive universals in the noun phrase
- An introduction to Nanosyntax
- Nanosyntax and syncretism in multidimensional paradigms
- Psycholinguistics & Neurolinguistics
- Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual productions of the English past tense in Arabic heritage speakers of Australian English
- Sociolinguistics and Anthropological Linguistics
- TP-internal focus and dialectal variation: the case of the Focalizing Ser
- Language policy and language planning in mainland Southeast Asia: Myanmar and Lisu
- Computational & Corpus Linguistics
- Effects of average and specific context probability on reduction of function words BE and HAVE
- Studying variation in Romanian: deletion of the definite article -l in continuous speech
- Computational construction grammar for visual question answering
- Cognitive Linguistics
- Language and creativity: a Construction Grammar approach to linguistic creativity