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In theoretical linguistics, a distinction is made between endocentric and exocentric constructions. A grammatical construction (for instance, a phrase or compound) is said to be endocentric if it fulfils the same linguistic function as one of its parts, and exocentric if it does not.Matthews (1981:147) provides an insightful discussion of the endo- vs. exocentric distinction. See Falk (2001:43ff., 49ff.) as well. The distinction reaches back at least to Bloomfield's work of the 1930s,See Bloomfield (1933), 194–196 and 235–237. who based it on terms by Pāṇini and Patañjali in Sanskrit grammar.Wujastyk (1982). Such a distinction is possible only in phrase structure grammars (constituency grammars), since in dependency grammars all constructions are necessarily endocentric.Concerning the lack of exocentric structures in dependency grammar, see Osborne et al. (2019: 48-50).
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 syntactic category to which the whole 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.
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 transformational theories of syntax, for without the concept of exocentricity, the notion of endocentricity was becoming vacuous.
By contrast, in constraint-based syntactic theories, such as Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), exocentric constructions are still widely used, but with a different role. Exocentricity is used in the treatment of non-configurational languages. As constraint-based models such as LFG do not represent a "deep structure" at which non-configurational languages can be treated as configurational, the exocentric S is used to formally represent the flat structure inherent in a non-configurational language. Hence, in a constraints-based analysis of Warlpiri, an exocentric structure follows the auxiliary, dominating all of the verb, arguments and adjuncts which are not raised to the specifier position of the IP:
In addition, in theories of morphology, 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.
The upper two trees on the left are endocentric since each time, one of the parts, i.e. the head, projects its category status up to the mother node. The upper tree on the right, in contrast, is exocentric, because neither of the parts projects its category status up to the mother node; Z is a category distinct from X or Y. The two dependency trees show the manner in which dependency-based structures are inherently endocentric. Since the number of nodes in the tree structure is necessarily equal to the number of elements (e.g. words) in the string, there is no way to assign the whole (i.e. XY) a category status that is distinct from both X and Y.
Traditional phrase structure trees are mostly endocentric, although the initial binary division of the clause is exocentric (S → NP VP), as mentioned above, e.g.
This tree structure contains four divisions, whereby only one of these divisions is exocentric (the highest one). The other three divisions are endocentric because the mother node has the same basic category status as one of its daughters. The one exocentric division disappears in the corresponding dependency tree:
Dependency positions the finite verb as the root of the entire tree, which means the initial exocentric division is impossible. This tree is entirely endocentric.
Below are a few examples of the exocentric compounds in Chinese.Zhang, N. N. (2007). Root merger in Chinese compounds. Studia Linguistica, 61(2), 170-184.Scalise, S., Fábregas, A., & Forza, F. (2009). Exocentricity in Compounding. 言語研究 (Gengo Kenkyu), 135, 49-84.
| big + small → size |
| good + bad → anyhow |
| open + close → switch |
| keep + defend → conservative |
| item + color → choose from |
| spear + shield → contradictory |
would be as follows: Where S is a non-projected exocentric structure which dominates both heads and phrases with equal weight. The elements in spec of IP and under S can be freely moved and switch places, as position in c-structure, except for I, plays a pragmatic rather than syntactic role in a constraints-based analysis of Warlpiri sentence structure.
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 any 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.
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