#headedness

[thelingspace]

Examining heads

In last week’s episode about compounds, we talked about how words have heads. The head of a word is the part that determines the overall grammatical features of the whole, like its syntactic category - adjective, noun, whatever. And in words that contain a single root, alongside one or more affixes, it’s the last one to connect up that gets to decide whether the final result is a noun, a verb, or something else. So, when you’ve got a bunch of suffixes attached to the end of your word, it’s the last one that dictates exactly what that word will be.

Let’s check an example. The suffix “-ize” usually takes a noun and turns it into a verb; so, the noun “character” becomes the verb “characterize.”

(1)    character + ize    =    characterize

But that won’t last long, if another affix wanders into the picture. The suffix “-ation” will easily turn any verb it touches into a noun, without a care for what might have come before; the verb “characterize,” which started off as a noun, regains some of its former identity as the word “characterization.”

(2)    characterize + ation    =    characterization

But when it comes to compound words, which involve two or more fully formed words, how do speakers decide which one gets to be in charge? This turns out to be language-specific.

In many languages, like English and German, the category of the rightmost word becomes the category of the whole thing. In English, a “hitman” is a noun, just like “man” is. In German, a “treffpunkt” — which combines the verb “treffen” (meet) with the noun “punkt” (point) — ends up as a noun, too. So, these languages are right-headed.

(3)    [N [V hit][N man]]

(4)    [N [V treffen][N punkt]]

Other languages, like Vietnamese, are left-headed. Combining the noun “nha” (establishment) and the verb “thuong” (wounded), we get the word “nha-thuong” — a compound noun meaning “hospital.”

(5)    [N [N nha][V thuong]]

When the compound is made up of nouns, control over features like gender and number again fall to the head. The plural of “beehive” is “beehives,” not “beeshive.” In German, the compound word “lastwagen” (truck) winds up masculine; “last” (cargo) is feminine, but the head “wagen” (vehicle) is masculine.

And when only verbs have made their way into the word? The head carries information about tense, since it’s “freeze-dried” and not “froze-dry.”

Something not touched on much in the episode was that English is semantically right-headed, too; the rightmost part of a compound spells out just what kind of thing the word refers to. So, a “train robbery” is a kind of robbery, not a kind of train.

(6a)    train + robbery    =    a robbery

(6b)    train + robbery    ≠    a train

However, the syntactic and semantic right- or left-headedness of a word can only be determined for endocentric compounds. As their name suggests (if you know a little Latin), endocentric compounds derive their category and meaning from somewhere inside the word. But languages can have exocentric compounds, too — compound words whose syntactic and semantic features appear to come from outside the word.

In spite of English being right-headed, a “scarecrow” isn’t a kind of crow, “Bigfoot” isn’t a kind of foot, and (as we mentioned in the episode) a “birdbrain” isn’t actually a brain. The exocentricity of these words is made even more obvious by the fact that “Bigfoot” doesn’t undergo irregular pluralization in the way that its rightmost member “foot” does, when it’s by itself; while the plural of “foot” is “feet,” having more than one “Bigfoot” around means you’ve got many “Bigfoots”, not “Bigfeet.”

We might go so far as to speculate that such words actually contain an invisible head, which silently works to provide the word with its various features. Such unseen structure would mean that exocentric compounds aren’t so different after all, and could account for why words like “Bigfoot” pluralize regularly: it isn’t the root “foot” that bears the number features of this word, but something unpronounced, just to the right of it. Of course, since these hypothesized heads are hidden, we can only detect them indirectly.

Finally, we’ve got dvandva compounds (from the Sanskrit word for “pair”). When you just can’t pick which half of the word will be the head, why not go for both! English has a few dvandva compounds in its inventory: a “manservant” is both a man and a servant, and the term “space-time” refers to both parts acting as one single thing. But other languages are much more productive: like, the Malayalam word for “parents” is formed by combining the words “acchan” (father) and “amma,” (mother), along with a plural suffix. And other roots can combine in a similar fashion.

(7)    acchanammamaar̄e

Of course, there are more ways to divide up compounds, beyond these categories. But, those will have to wait for a future installment! ^_^

[asktheleagueofnerds]

Heads Up

Heads Up: how the structure of sentences makes some languages feel exactly opposite to English http://wp.me/p4fJvX-aSS

oh my god language nerd i am learning turkish and it feels like everything is backwards!!!! AM I CRAZY WHYYYYYYYYYYY???

-alimi

***

Dear Alimi,

You are not crazy, o emphatic person. You are totally correct. Don’t flip, it’ll be okay.

Sentences are made of words. Mind-blowing, I know. But the words don’t come in any ol random order. They come in chunks. Think about this sentence for a sec:

       …

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[dovetaildaydreams]

Both Of Them

I decide that it’s both

The left and the right

That conceals from us the middle

Which today is a big deep hole in the ground

 .

We stand around it in a circle

Like Pirates

We can’t see the bottom

Because it is deep

 .

It’s a Tuesday

Meaning they are looking for us

The owners are looking for us

 .

But we’re far into the jungle

To find us would mean

Us being found

 .

I grab a white stone

One that is happy

I was about to throw it into the hole

To see how deep it was

But now it means too much to me

To throw it in there

 .

But then I remember

I have to work on these kinds of things

So I throw it

. 

And a second later we heard it hit the bottom

Meaning the hole really wasn’t that deep

Meaning we underestimated how shallow the whole had been

[syntactician]

I bought myself a Cadbury's Boost (other chocolate bars are available, though none are as good if you want to ingest maximum calories). It describes itself thus:

2 x milk chocolate with caramel and biscuit filling bars

(It was a Boost Duo, OK? Don't judge me.) Does that sound at all odd to you? Grammatically, I mean; it obviously sounds perfect in terms of content, though it does sell itself short, in my opinion. It's so much more than just 'caramel and biscuit'. But syntactically, it's really awkward.  Happily, the reason for its awkwardness can be attributed to the constraint that I work on. It's called the Final-Over-Final Constraint (FOFC), and it's about what phrases can be combined in what order. It specifically states that one order is not allowed, and it's the one instantiated in the description of my delicious chocolatey snack (although it's so many calories, it might have to be my delicious chocolatey tea).  This is the (partial) structure, as far as I can work it out:

[[milk chocolate [with caramel and biscuit filling]] bars]

Bars is the head of the phrase. It's at the end, as you can see. This means that it's a head-final phrase. FOFC states (basically) that a head-final phrase should not immediately 'dominate' (i.e. have as its immediate constituent) a head-initial phrase (that would be one where the head is at the start). The phrase milk chocolate with caramel and biscuit filling is just such a head-initial phrase, with chocolate as its head (we're not going to talk about milk now - it doesn't affect the argument). So we have precisely the relationship that FOFC doesn't like.  This type of construction is sometimes found: the quick-off-the-mark athlete, his out-of-the-blue question. These are marginal, for most people, and it's not a very productive construction: *a happy in his job employee is not good at all. The ones that are accepted are often taken to contain a lexicalised or Spelt-Out element - that is, the first part is not interpreted as having any internal structure, so any structural constraints don't apply to its parts, only to it as a whole, as if it was one word. The Boost description, I think we can agree, is definitely compositional (that is, it's built by the syntax, not interpreted as a single unit), so that explanation doesn't hold and we get a decidedly dodgy bundle of words.  In fact, this is such a mangled piece of syntax that there are at least two other reasons why this is bad. It leaves us hanging a long time before we get to the head, which we English speakers are none too keen on, and furthermore, the PP with caramel and biscuit fillingmodifies bars, not milk chocolate, so it should follow bars. Why it's where it is at all is beyond me. So we don't need FOFC to write this off as a bad job. But as we have FOFC for other reasons anyway, we can add it to the long list of Things Cadbury's Has Bungled.  (P.S. You may have noticed that Final-Over-Final Constraint violates itself. Its originators are quite proud of this, although it was accidental - the observation is attributed to Gertjan Postma. They note that all the best generalisations do so.)