Native American verbs vs. nouns

[Koontz John E]

Cleaning a few things up I found this unanswered inquiry from Rory Larson.

On Mon, 6 Jan 2003 rlarson at unlnotes01.unl.edu wrote:
> >> Definitions needed, preferably with examples:
> >>
> >>   Head ...

It occurs to me that I should just have referred Rory's request to the
list.  I'm probably not the person to be trying to offer a rapid sketch of
modern syntactic theory and terminology.  Some might question my ability
to this for even ancient syntactic theory and terminology.  Maybe
Katherine or Ardis - maybe next Thursday.  Anyway, if Rory is going to be
there - I think Katherine is - I'll be glad to get the refresher course
myself.  John (Boyle) - you keep organizing syntax sessions - how about
you?  I think in the context of the list, at least, and given his intimacy
with libraries that a few suggested references might be easiest ...

> In any case, a listing of "head" relationships doesn't answer
> my question: What is a "head" in essence?  What chain of
> reasoning leads us to the concept of a "head"?
>
> I don't have any problem with using the term "head" for the
> noun in a noun phrase that all the determiners, adjectives,
> prepositional phrases, relative clauses, genitives and
> qualifying nouns attach to; it seems like a useful word here.
> My issue is with extrapolating this to verb chains and
> prepositions, etc.