Exocentric Construction
An exocentric construction consists of two or more parts, whereby the one or the other of the parts cannot be viewed as providing the bulk of the semantic content of the whole. Further, the syntactic distribution of the whole cannot be viewed as being determined by the one or the other of the parts. The classic instance of an exocentric construction is the sentence (in a phrase structure grammar). The traditional binary division of the sentence (S) into a subject noun phrase (NP) and a predicate verb phrase (VP) was exocentric:
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- Hannibal destroyed Rome.
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 Theory in 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 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 Theory, the endocentric vs. exocentric distinction started to become less important in the theory of syntax, for without the concept of exocentricity, the notion of endocentricity was becoming vacuous. In theories of morphology however, the distinction remains, since certain compounds 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.
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Famous quotes containing the word construction:
“Striving toward a goal puts a more pleasing construction on our advance toward death.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)