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Headless in Berlin: Headless structures in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

Subject Areas: HPSG, head, NP, DP, empty element

This paper appeared 2022 in Ulrike Freywald, Horst Simon & Stefan Müller: Headedness and/or grammatical anarchy? (Empirically Oriented Theoretical Morphology and Syntax 11). Berlin: Language Science Press.

The paper deals with the status of heads in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). Firstly, I present the background assumptions: lexical representation of valence at the head, projection of head features. Secondly, I discuss the question whether DP or NP structures should be assumed. I show that both the determiner and the noun may be missing and suggest analyses with empty elements. There is an ongoing fight about the existence of empty elements. I therefore show that it is straigh-forward to transform grammars using empty elements into grammars without empty elements. I explain why one should not transform the grammars and use empty elements instead. After the discussion of structures with empty heads I deal with Jackendoff's NPN construction and argue that these structures are indeed headless. This is not a problem for HPSG since it allows for headless constructions in principle. The paper closes with some remarks about the aquisition of empty elements and the evidence from within the language to be aquired that is needed for this.

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