Heads and history

This paper considers and compares the status of the concept of head within different grammatical frameworks (Minimalism, LFG and HPSG) and its relevance to our understanding of the mechanisms of change involved in grammaticalization. Our data is drawn from the developments of lexical prepositions into grammatical prepositions and complementisers in Romance and Germanic. We argue in favour of a non-derivational approach and in particular against accounts in which all developments are mediated through a chain of functional heads of the kind deployed in cartography and nanosyntax