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 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.
