Nominal relations in systemic dependency grammar

Abstract

Traditionally dependency grammar recognizes heads and dependents as primitive elements [Tesniere 1959, Robinson 1970, Hudson 1984]. I have suggested [Owens 1984b, 1985a] that these notions are dispensable ones and in this paper support this point with data from nominal relations (NP relations) in Oromo. In the first part of this paper, I describe the basic theoretical model, and in the second I consider two phenomena that have often been assumed to require the recognition of the notion 'head' (e.g. Zwicky [1985], namely agreement and case marking. I argue that no such notion is needed to describe them.

Keywords

• dependency grammar
• Oromo
• agreement
• case marking