Traditional grammatical models are typically built on the principles of ‘asymmetry, dependency, and hierarchy’ (1). These models align with the concept of ‘head’ or ‘headedness’; that is, the head is more prominent than its co-elements. However, this approach may encounter difficulties in explaining certain structures without a clear-cut hierarchy (e.g. copulative compounds such as Spieler-trainer ‘player-coach’ (German)) and heads exhibiting unpredictable behavior (e.g. headless verb phrases). Despite the continuing interest in these exceptional structures among grammarians, not much effort has been made to critically and systematically examine the core concepts of headedness from both empirical and theoretical perspectives, except, for example, the seminal studies of Zwicky (Reference Zwicky1985) and Corbett, Fraser & McGlashan (Reference Corbett, Fraser and McGlashan1993).

The book under review, consisting of 11 papers selected from a workshop in 2017, aims to fill this gap. As indicated in Chapter 1, ‘Problems and problem-solving are generally quite framework-dependent’ (20), this book incorporates a range of theoretical frameworks, including Chomskyan generative syntax in Chapter 3, Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) in Chapter 4, and optimality theory in Chapters 7 and 8, offering a comprehensive and insightful exploration of headedness in syntax, morphology, and phonology.

This volume is logically organized to accommodate a systematic progression of articles, commencing with an introduction to theory-internal arguments of headedness and culminating in empirical investigations and in-depth critical insights. The book is divided into four sections. The first two chapters elaborate on the overarching themes of this volume and the origins of head effects. Chapters 3--6 concentrate on identifying heads in specific structures that contain controversial heads, including noun phrases, afinite constructions, and words with affixes. Chapters 7--10 present the use of headedness in analyzing particular structures, including adjuncts, compounds, and interjections, as well as prosody in poetry and natural metrics. The final chapter discusses the possibility of grammatical paradigms that do not rely on the concept of headedness.

In Chapter 1, ‘Anarchy in Grammar? On headedness and some of its problems, illustrated by examples from German’, Ulrike Freywald & Horst J. Simon introduce the volume by focusing on three potentially problematic cases regarding hierarchies in structure-building: 1. ‘left-headed’ verbs deviating from the usual directionality in structure-building; 2. copulative compounds and morphological reduplications displaying symmetric structures with either no or more than one head; and 3. auxiliary verb ellipses lacking a visible (or audible) head. All of these analyses inspire critical thinking and fresh ideas, although they provide no definite answers.

In Chapter 2, ‘Three sources of head effects’, Yury Lander maintains that head properties, rather than heads themselves, are an integral aspect of grammar. Lander analyzes certain adjectives in various languages and proposes that they possess head properties within noun phrases, even though they are traditionally considered modifiers. Then he proposes three diachronic factors contributing to head properties, namely wider scope of an element within a compositional structure, extraordinary information load of an element in a constituent, and the development of a construction from an appositive structure. Due to information prominence and/or typical compositional combinations, adjectives in configurational structures originating from appositives may possess head properties as a result of grammaticalization.

Chapters 3 and 4 use distinct frameworks regarding the NP versus DP controversy. In Chapter 3, ‘The NP vs. DP-debate and notions of headedness’, Martin Salzmann posits that the DP hypothesis wins more support in the NP versus DP debate based on two generally accepted concepts. First, some evidence suggests that it is the determiner (D) that selects the noun (N). Second, evidence from categorial selection, the selection of D-elements in idioms, and agreement with hybrid nouns indicates that the features of D, rather than those of N, are present on the maximal projection.

In Chapter 4, ‘Headless in Berlin: Headless (nominal) structures in head-driven phrase structure grammar’, Stefan Müller analyzes NPs within HPSG. This framework assigns significant importance to heads in determining the internal structure and external distribution of phrases. Using nominal structures as a case study, the author advocates that the NP analysis is supported by evidence from thematic role assignment and selection in idioms (Osborne & Groß Reference Osborne and Groß2012, Bruening Reference Bruening2020). The paper also examines examples of empty heads in nominal structures in German and copulaless sentences in African-American vernacular English. Müller suggests that all structures must have a head, and proposes that the idea of empty heads could be extended to unheaded N-P-N constructions. The paper demonstrates that grammars incorporating empty elements can be transformed into those without such elements. Nonetheless, there are certain criteria for invoking empty elements, such as their detectability in language input and support from internal evidence within the language.

In Chapter 5, ‘Silent heads in Early New High German’, Ulrike Demske explores the phenomenon of missing heads in afinite constructions (ACs), a type of subordinate clauses lacking a finite auxiliary verb. ACs were frequent during the Early New High German (ENHG, 1350–1650) period. After sketching the distribution of ACs based on two treebanks of ENHG, Demske argues that ACs are a special type of ellipsis and share similarities with antecedent-based ellipsis. By retrieving the missing information in ACs, she argues that ACs arise from ambiguous past-tense verb forms that exhibit a preponderance of ENHG syntax. ACs have largely fallen out of use in contemporary German primarily due to the growing standardization of writing from the 17th century onward, which privileges the spellout of silent heads and refrains from using ellipsis. Overall, Demske establishes that obtaining knowledge about the background of ACs may contribute to the understanding of headedness.

Following Chapters 3–5 on headedness in syntax, Manuela Korth discusses the question of ‘Categoryless heads in morphology?’ in Chapter 6. Korth explores the development and modification of morphological head theories and the mechanisms of projection and feature-percolation in Lieber’s (Reference Lieber1992) approach. The paper examines inflected forms, prefixed words, and diminutives, which pose challenges for theories of morphological headedness due to the absence of a category feature in affixes. Specifically, with regard to syntax, affixes are positioned at a lower projection level compared with the other elements in a word and display prosodic subordination effects unless they indicate a contrast, demonstrating non-head characteristics. However, Korth argues for a morphological head identification that is not reliant on categorization, but rather on different criteria that set affixes parallel to syntactic heads. Namely, in terms of morphological headedness, category-free heads exist, and all affixes are assumed to be heads defined by morphological minimality and selection restrictions. Additionally, the study evaluates the findings regarding stress assignment processes within affixed words and highlights the similarities between morphological and syntactic heads in terms of prosodic issues.

In Chapter 7, Hubert Haider introduces the left-left constraint (LLC), a structural constraint that applies to the left-hand adjuncts of head-initial major lexical phrases. The LLC stipulates that the adjunct’s head must be phrase-final and adjacent to the host phrase. After testing four previous accounts, Haider emphasizes that LLC does exist but cannot be explained by existing phrase structure conditions. He argues that left adjuncts of head-initial phrases are structurally licensed by the principle of proper attachment (PPA), which governs the attachment of phrases outside the directionality domain of the head of the host phrase. In the case of LLC, the head-initial host phrase, in which a left head licenses its right dependents, cannot directionally license its left adjunct. As a result, the left-hand adjunct must license its position through attaching itself to the host phrase while maintaining minimal distance between their heads. The LLC is thus an effect of the PPA.

In Chapter 8, ‘Head alignment in German compounds: Implications for prosodic constituency and morphological parsing’, Renate Raffelsiefen argues that word boundaries and the respective boundaries of the most prominent foot coincide for three compound categories, namely copulative, phrasal, and ‘regular’ compounds. Furthermore, the disparities among these compound categories may help us understand morphological parsing. To be specific, compound categories can be classified by the features of their complete form (e.g. the location of main stress) in a top-down approach rather than by morphemes and their combinatory rules in a bottom-up approach.

Chapter 9, Patrizia Noel Aziz Hanna explores heads and feet in prosody, poetry, and theories of metrics from the perspective of natural metrics. There are three issues concerning headedness versus ‘grammatical anarchy’ in German prosody. The first concern is language contact, exemplified by the German and French alexandrines. In German, every syllable is assigned to a foot, which implies headedness for German prosody and metrics; however, French syllable-counting alexandrines did not have feet but instead had phrase-final stress. To German speakers, French disyllabic words sound iambic and are therefore perceived as having iambic feet, which was demonstrated by the integration of meters without feet in French into stress-based metrical systems in German. This exemplifies fossilized foreign language interference and shows that French poetic meters, which are designed without metrical heads, cannot be transferred to German without heads. This also provides independent evidence for the psycholinguistic reality of phonological feet in German. The second aspect, language change, is exemplified by examining anacrusis in German poetry. Anacrusis is a succession of unstressed syllables at the beginning of poetry lines, which are not grouped into feet and cannot be motivated solely on phonological grounds. Instead, it has been influenced by a combination of phonology, syntax and information structure, stemming from Proto-Indo-European to Germanic. Third, the author delves into the relationship between phonological and metrical theories in terms of headedness, finding that natural metrics favor a flat prosodic hierarchy in both the German alexandrine and the Germanic anacrusis.

Jörg Bücker’s Chapter 10, ‘Burning down the phrase and heating up the head: The interjectionalization of German von wegen’, examines the interjection of von wégen (lit. ‘of for’), an expression of emphatic disagreement in colloquial German equivalent to English my foot. In contrast to other deprepositional interjections that usually arise from full-fledged prepositional phrases in the form of PP > INT⁰, von wégen derives solely from bare prepositional heads in the form of P⁰ > INT⁰. To reconstruct the interjectionalization pathway of P⁰ > INT⁰, the author identifies four major steps: reactivation of a prior speech act as a quotation, increased scope, expression of disagreement, and presence of an emphatic accent. Bücker concludes that the status, category, and features of von wégen as a prepositional head have significantly changed over time. The high complexity and context-dependency changes of P⁰ > INT⁰ are the reason why it is less common compared with the alternative PP > INT⁰ pathway, which requires fewer changes and contexts.

In Chapter 11, ‘Headedness as an epiphenomenon: Case studies on compounding and blending in German’, Andreas Nolda explores the possibility of a grammar theory that can work without the concept of heads. Nolda adopts the Pattern-and-Restriction Theory (Nolda Reference Nolda, Behme and Neef2018) to reconceptualize the notion of right-headedness in German compounds and blends as purely descriptive. Therefore, the author concludes that headedness bears minimal theoretical significance in the paradigmatic approach to word formation.

This book presents readers with a panoramic view of current research on headedness, covering both empirical and theoretical aspects. It effectively examines headedness from multiple theoretical perspectives, including generative syntax, HPSG, and optimality theory. Meanwhile, discussions therein draw on diverse methodologies, such as corpus-linguistic and typological approaches, to facilitate a comprehensive analysis. Furthermore, it thoroughly delves into numerous grammatical phenomena in syntax, morphology, and phonology.

For this reason, adding a subject index and/or a glossary would be beneficial for readers to navigate the various interpretations of terms used for different purposes throughout the book, such as copulative compound, appositive structure, auxiliary, and possessives. For instance, copulative compound is referenced in Chapter 1 as a counter-example of headedness and in Chapter 8 as a demonstration of head alignment research. Given the analysis from different theoretical perspectives, a solid foundation in linguistic theory may also be necessary for full comprehension of all the chapters. Additionally, the book relies on data primarily from major European languages, predominantly German, but diversifying the data could strengthen the conclusions and attract more attention from linguists.

Nevertheless, the collection of works stimulates critical thinking by highlighting the ongoing debates concerning head concepts versus grammatical anarchy.