Re: head-initial structure

>     There's a theory (I forget whose) which says that compounding and
> affixing mirror syntax, and in cases where it doesn't, there was
> a historical
> change that moved it away from mirroring.  Oh, hey!  That's the Mirror
> Principle, isn't it?  Still forget whose it is.
Baker, 1985... i can't seem to find a page summarizing the theory, though. i
can only find bits and pieces.

> <<2. How good is the correlation between prefixing and head-initial
>
> compounding in natlangs (and in which ones do they correlate)?>>
>
>     I think suffixing goes with head-initial; prefixing with head-final.
That doesn't happen in english: we have head-final, with inflection being
exclusively suffixing. It just makes sense to me that the inflection of a
word should be closer to the root of the stem:

(head-final) hand+book -> (plural) hand+book-s

it's more than one book, not more than one hand:

(head-initial) book+hand -> (plural) book+hand-s

this order seems counter-intuitive to me. Thus, in my language:

(head-initial) book+hand -> (plural) s-book+hand

thus, the inflection is closer to the core root.

>     Well, with the languages I know that have head-initial noun
> phrases, the
> demonstratives always come before the noun...  I'm not sure if that
> correlates with the Mirror Principle...  Maybe the Relevance Principle.
According to this handout in my typology class, there isn't a strong
correlation with demonstratives and nouns w.r.t. head final vs. head
initial. There is only a slight tendency for demonstratives to come first in
all languages.

> <<4. Has anyone else tried exclusively head-first morphology in their
>
> language? (head-first compounds & exclusive prefixing).>>
>
>     Well, head-first compounds and exclusive *suffixing*--like Turkish.
> Postpositions also go with suffixing and head-initial, according to the
> Mirror Principle.
>
> -David
>
> "fawiT, Gug&g, tSagZil-a-Gariz, waj min DidZejsat wazid..."
> "Soft, driven, slow and mad, like some new language..."
>                     -Jim Morrison
--
Garrett Jones
http://www.alkaline.org