Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The head of Russian numeral expressions
- 3 The phonology of heads in Haruai
- 4 Patterns of headedness
- 5 Head-hunting: on the trail of the nominal Janus
- 6 The headedness of noun phrases: slaying the nominal hydra
- 7 Head- versus dependent-marking: the case of the clause
- 8 Heads in discourse: structural versus functional centricity
- 9 Heads in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar
- 10 Heads and lexical semantics
- 11 Heads, parsing and word-order universals
- 12 Do we have heads in our minds?
- 13 Heads, bases and functors
- References
- Index
3 - The phonology of heads in Haruai
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The head of Russian numeral expressions
- 3 The phonology of heads in Haruai
- 4 Patterns of headedness
- 5 Head-hunting: on the trail of the nominal Janus
- 6 The headedness of noun phrases: slaying the nominal hydra
- 7 Head- versus dependent-marking: the case of the clause
- 8 Heads in discourse: structural versus functional centricity
- 9 Heads in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar
- 10 Heads and lexical semantics
- 11 Heads, parsing and word-order universals
- 12 Do we have heads in our minds?
- 13 Heads, bases and functors
- References
- Index
Summary
Introduction
In examining the interrelation between grammatical terms as used in the description of individual languages and in general linguistic theory, it is useful to bear in mind that individual languages often present language-specific criteria for a particular grammatical notion which, while not forming part of the general linguistic definition of that notion, none the less provide a language-internal means of identifying instances of the notion in question and thus solidifying our data-base for study of the grammatical notion in general linguistic theory. For instance, the possibility of forming a comparative hungrier shows that English hungry is an adjective in John is hungry, thus providing an instance of a concept that can be adjectivalized even though in many languages non-adjectival constructions are preferred (such as a noun in French Jean a faim, literally ‘John has hunger’, or a verb in Russian Vanja xočet esʹ, literally ‘John wants to eat’); note that cross-linguistically, the existence of comparative forms of adjectives is rather rare, so this is very much a language particular test. In this chapter, I argue that Haruai has a language internal phonological correlate of the head-dependent relation, namely that, in the absence of other factors (contrastive stress, greater stress associated with focus, that is, essential new information), dependents receive greater stress than their heads. The basic wordstress rule in Haruai is for stress to fall on the first syllabic segment of the word; the only consistent exceptions are negative verb forms, which are stressed on the negative morpheme, for example n dw-lm-a ‘I did not go’, literally ‘I go-NEG-PAST(-1.SG)-DEC'.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Heads in Grammatical Theory , pp. 36 - 43Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993