When a head is not a head

A constructional approach to exocentricity in English

Abstract

As the name of the framework suggests, one of the driving forces behind traditional HPSG analyses is the notion of head. With the exception of a few non-headed constructions (i.e., mostly coordination), constructions are typically seen as being headed by a particular word or phrase with the nonhead constituting a complement, specifier or adjunct. The head determines the internal composition of a phrase and is responsible for its external distribution. Moreover, syntactic headedness, as determined by morphosyntactic criteria, is typically assumed to coincide with semantic headness. In the case of NPs, for instance, this means that the semantic contribution (including the index) of the entire phrase is provided by the element that is the head by morphosyntactic criteria (typically the noun). 

In this paper, we intend to challenge this view of heads on the basis of two constructions from English. In both instances, we will argue that the constituents that are responsible for the internal combinatorial make-up of the phrase do not constitute heads because they fail both to determine the external distribution of the phrase and to contribute the semantic index of the projected phrase. At the same time, however, we will show that it is possible to view these cases not as random departures from more well-behaved headed constructions, but instead as particular instantiations of more general construction types which do not impose strict conditions on external headedness.