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A dependent-marking language has grammatical markers of agreement and
Plural nouns in English require the plural form of a dependent demonstrative determiner, and prepositions require the object form of a dependent personal pronoun.
The noun marks the dependent determiner in gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter) and number (singular or plural). In other words, the gender and number of the noun determine the form of the determiner that must appear. Nouns in German also mark their dependent adjectives in gender and number, but the markings vary across determiners and adjectives. Also, a head noun in German can mark a dependent noun with the genitive case.
case government
In linguistics, case government is a type of government wherein a verb or adposition imposes grammatical case requirements on its noun phrase complement. For example, in German the preposition 'for' governs the accusative case: 'for me-accusati ...
between the words of phrase
In grammar, a phrasecalled expression in some contextsis a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English language, English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adject ...
s that tend to appear more on dependents than on head
A head is the part of an organism which usually includes the ears, brain, forehead, cheeks, chin, eyes, nose, and mouth, each of which aid in various sensory functions such as sight, hearing, smell, and taste. Some very simple ani ...
s. The distinction between head-marking and dependent-marking was first explored by Johanna Nichols in 1986, and has since become a central criterion in language typology in which languages are classified according to whether they are more head-marking or dependent-marking. Many languages employ both head and dependent-marking, but some employ double-marking, and yet others employ zero-marking
A zero-marking language is one with no marker (linguistics), grammatical marks on neither the dependents (or the grammatical modifier, modifiers) nor the head (linguistics), heads (or the nucleus (linguistics), nuclei) that show the relationship ...
. However, it is not clear that the head of a clause has anything to do with the head of a noun phrase, or even what the head of a clause is.
In English
English has few inflectional markers of agreement and so can be construed as zero-marking much of the time. Dependent-marking, however, occurs when a singular or plural noun demands the singular or plural form of the demonstrative determiner ''this/these'' or ''that/those'' and when a verb or preposition demands the subject or object form of a personal pronoun: ''I/me'', ''he/him'', ''she/her'', ''they/them'', ''who/whom''. The following representations ofdependency grammar
Dependency grammar (DG) is a class of modern Grammar, grammatical theories that are all based on the dependency relation (as opposed to the ''constituency relation'' of Phrase structure grammar, phrase structure) and that can be traced back prima ...
illustrate some cases:Dependency grammar trees similar to the ones that appear here can be found en masse in Ágel et al. (2003/6).
:
Plural nouns in English require the plural form of a dependent demonstrative determiner, and prepositions require the object form of a dependent personal pronoun.
In German
Such instances of dependent-marking are a relatively rare occurrence in English, but dependent-marking occurs much more frequently in related languages, such as German. There, for instance, dependent-marking is present in most noun phrases. A noun marks its dependent determiner: ::
The noun marks the dependent determiner in gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter) and number (singular or plural). In other words, the gender and number of the noun determine the form of the determiner that must appear. Nouns in German also mark their dependent adjectives in gender and number, but the markings vary across determiners and adjectives. Also, a head noun in German can mark a dependent noun with the genitive case.
See also
*Constituent (linguistics)
In syntactic analysis, a constituent is a word or a group of words that function as a single unit within a hierarchical structure. The constituent structure of sentences is identified using ''tests for constituents''. These tests apply to a porti ...
*Dependency grammar
Dependency grammar (DG) is a class of modern Grammar, grammatical theories that are all based on the dependency relation (as opposed to the ''constituency relation'' of Phrase structure grammar, phrase structure) and that can be traced back prima ...
* Double-marking language
*Head (linguistics)
In linguistics, the head or nucleus of a phrase is the word that determines the syntax, syntactic category of that phrase. For example, the head of the noun phrase "boiling hot water" is the noun (head noun) "water".
Analogously, the head of a c ...
*Head-marking language
A language is head-marking if the grammatical marks showing agreement between different words of a phrase tend to be placed on the heads (or nuclei) of phrases, rather than on the modifiers or dependents. Many languages employ both head-marki ...
* Zero-marking language
References
Sources
*Ágel, V., L. Eichinger, H.-W. Eroms, P. Hellwig, H. Heringer, and H. Lobin (eds.) 2003/6. Dependency and valency: An international handbook of contemporary research. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. *Nichols, J. 1986. Head-marking and dependent-marking grammar. Language 62, 1, 56-119. *Nichols, J. 1992. Linguistic diversity in space and time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. {{DEFAULTSORT:Dependent-Marking Language Linguistic typology