A cross-linguistic perspective on the Right-Hand Head Rule

The rule and the exceptions

Bibliographic Data

ID21226751
AuthorsAbdel Rahman Mitib Altakhaineh (0000-0001-7605-2497, Al Ain University, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume5
Issue1
Publication date2019-01-28
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLinguistics Vanguard (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2199-174X • E-ISSN: 2199-174X
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/lingvan-2018-0033
OpenAlexW2943272464
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited18

The study investigates the patterning of headedness in compounding, in particular the patterning of regularities and exceptions to the Right-Hand Head Rule (RHHR). An examination of the grammatical descriptions of compounds in English, French, Italian, German, Arabic, Hebrew, Dutch and Spanish indicates that languages such as German and Dutch are strongly right-headed, other languages such as French and Arabic are strongly left-headed, whereas English, Spanish and Italian tend to be mixed between left-headed and right-headed. Despite the existence of some exceptions to RHHR in some of these languages, the rule remains viable, as these exceptions may have a systematic pattern. While in Romance languages the exceptions seem to be phonologically conditioned, in Germanic languages the exceptions appear to be syntactically conditioned. This study raises the question whether internal headedness in a language could be regarded as a fairly arbitrary property, unconnected to the language’s other characteristics, or not

Arabic · German · Germanic languages · Grammatical Gender · Hebrew · Linguistics · Noun · Romance languages · Computer Science · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation · Artificial Intelligence

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