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7 - Hudson on Heads

About Distributional Criteria

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2024

By
Sylvain Kahane
Edited by
Eva Duran Eppler ,
Nikolas Gisborne  and
Andrew Rosta
Eva Duran Eppler
Affiliation:
Roehampton University, London
Nikolas Gisborne
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Andrew Rosta
Affiliation:
University of Central Lancashire, Preston
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Summary

In this paper dedicated to Hudson, we discuss the criteria used to define the dependency structure and to characterize the syntactic head of every syntactic unit. Hudson was the first one, in the 1980s, to really try to justify his choices of analysis in dependency syntax by using both distributional criteria with and without removal, but he never stated them in black and white. This paper is an attempt to propose distributional criteria for choosing a syntactic head and proving the head status of words that can generally not stand alone, such as determiners, prepositions, or auxiliaries. Three criteria are stated – a Positive and a Negative distributional criterion with removal and a Distributional criterion without removal – as well as a Distributional criterion for the head of a sentence. These criteria are compared to criteria used in Garde (), Hudson (, ), and Mel’čuk (), showing that Mel’čuk circumvented them in practice, while Hudson applied them quite systematically but never really stated them clearly.

Keywords

dependency treesyntactic headdistribution criterion without removaldeterminer phrase
Type
Chapter
Information
Word Grammar, Cognition and Dependency , pp. 163 - 177
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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