Endocentric and exocentric

In theoretical linguistics, a distinction is made between endocentric and exocentric constructions. A grammatical construction (e.g. a phrase or compound word) is said to be endocentric if it fulfills the same linguistic function as one of its parts, and exocentric if it does not. The distinction reaches back at least to Bloomfield's work of the 1930s. Such a distinction is possible only in phrase structure grammars (constituency grammars), since in dependency grammars all constructions are necessarily endocentric.

Endocentric construction

An endocentric construction consists of an obligatory head and one or more dependents, whose presence serves to narrow the meaning of the head. For example:

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 grammatical 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.