Endocentric and exocentric: Difference between revisions

These phrases are indisputably endocentric. They are endocentric because the one word in each case carries the bulk of the semantic content and determines the grammaticalsyntactic category to which the whole [[constituent (linguistics)|constituent]] will be assigned. The phrase ''big house'' is a [[noun phrase]] in line with its part ''house'', which is a noun. Similarly, ''sing songs'' is a [[verb phrase]] in line with its part ''sing'', which is a verb. The same is true of ''very long''; it is a an [[adjective phrase]] in line with its part ''long'', which is an adjective. In more formal terms, the distribution of an endocentric construction is functionally equivalent, or approaching equivalence, to one of its parts, which serves as the center, or head, of the whole. An endocentric construction is also known as a ''headed'' construction, where the head is contained "inside" the construction.

Since the whole is unlike either of its parts, it is exocentric. In other words, since the whole is neither a noun (N) like ''Hannibal'' nor a verb phrase (VP) like ''destroyed Rome'' but rather a sentence (S), it is exocentric. With the advent of [[X-bar Theorytheory]] in [[transformational grammar|Transformational Grammar]] in the 1970s, this traditional exocentric division was largely abandoned and replaced by an endocentric analysis, whereby the sentence is viewed as an [[inflectional phrase|inflection phrase]] (IP), which is essentially a projection of the verb (a fact that makes the sentence a big VP in a sense). Thus, with the advent of X-bar Theorytheory, the endocentric vs. exocentric distinction started to become less important in thetransformational theorytheories of syntax, for without the concept of exocentricity, the notion of endocentricity was becoming vacuous. In theories of [[morphology (linguistics)|morphology]] however, the distinction remains, since certain [[compound (linguistics)|compound]]s seem to require an exocentric analysis, e.g. ''have-not'' in ''Bill is a have-not''. For a class of compounds described as exocentric, see [[bahuvrihi]].

While exocentric structures have largely disappeared from most theoretical analyses of standard sentence structure, many theories of syntax still assume (something like) exocentric divisions for [[coordination (linguistics)|coordinate structures]], e.g.

The brackets each time mark the conjuncts of a coordinate structure, whereby this coordinate structure includes the material appearing between the left-most bracket and the right-most bracket; the coordinator is positioned between the conjuncts. Coordinate structures like these do not lend themselves to an endocentric analysis in aany clear way, nor to an exocentric analysis. One might argue that the coordinator is the head of the coordinate structure, which would make it endocentric. This argument would have to ignore the numerous occurrences of coordinate structures that lack a coordinator ([[asyndeton]]), however. One might therefore argue instead that coordinate structures like these are multi-headed, each conjunct being or containing a head. The difficulty with this argument, however, is that the traditional endocentric vs. exocentric distinction did not foresee the existence of multi-headed structures, which means that it did not provide a guideline for deciding whether a multi-headed structure should be viewed as endo- or exocentric. Coordinate structures thus remain a problem area for the endo- vs. exocentric distinction in general.

*[[Leonard Bloomfield|Bloomfield, Leonard]]. 1933. Language. New York: Henry Holt.

*[[Noam Chomsky|Chomsky, Noam]]. 1957. ''[[Syntactic Structures]]''. The Hague/Paris: Mouton.

*Matthews, P. H. 1981. Syntax. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.