Anarchy in grammar? On headedness and some of its problems, illustrated by examples from German

Freywald, Ulrike; Simon, Horst J.

Abstract

One of the fundamental characteristics of grammars of human languages seems to be the fact that (most of) their structures are inherently asymmetric, with exactly one element, the head, being more important than its co-elements. By way of introduction to this volume, we discuss some phenomena that pose potential problems for such a view and that have not yet been fully described empirically and understood theoretically. Here we focus on three structures from German, namely “left-headed” (?) verbs, then morphological reduplications and copulative/coordinative compounds, and finally (auxiliary) verb ellipses, all of which are not easily captured by a straightforward analysis in terms of head structures.