Headless in Berlin: Headless (nominal) structures in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

This paper deals with the status of heads in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). Firstly, background assumptions are presented: the lexical representation of valence at the head and projection of head features. Secondly, I discuss criteria for determining the head of a phrase. I use nominal structures as an example, since the DP/NP debate is still undecided across frameworks, and exploring the arguments from an HPSG perspective may be interesting for readers. Zwicky’s (1985) criteria are discussed, and I show that most of them do not decide the issue for German nominal structures, but assignment of semantic roles by relational nouns and selectional relations in idioms (Osborne & Groß 2012, Bruening 2020) support NP structures. I discuss nominal structures with non-overt nouns and copulaless sentences in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and argue for an empty nominal head. I show that empty elements can be eliminated from grammars but argue that they are nevertheless useful in nominal structures and copula constructions in AAVE, since they capture generalizations. However, there are other structures like Jackendoff’s (2008) N-P-N construction that should be an- alyzed as unheaded. The paper closes with general considerations about the use of empty elements in grammars, arguing that they should be detectable in the input by systematic variation with overt material. This excludes the assumption of empty elements like AgrO or Topic in grammars of languages like German, since there is no overt material associated with these heads