A cross-linguistic perspective on the Right-Hand Head Rule: the rule and the exceptions

Abstract

Abstract The study investigates the patterning of headedness in compounding, in particular the patterning of regularities and exceptions to the Right-Hand Head Rule (RHHR). An examination of the grammatical descriptions of compounds in English, French, Italian, German, Arabic, Hebrew, Dutch and Spanish indicates that languages such as German and Dutch are strongly right-headed, other languages such as French and Arabic are strongly left-headed, whereas English, Spanish and Italian tend to be mixed between left-headed and right-headed. Despite the existence of some exceptions to RHHR in some of these languages, the rule remains viable, as these exceptions may have a systematic pattern. While in Romance languages the exceptions seem to be phonologically conditioned, in Germanic languages the exceptions appear to be syntactically conditioned. This study raises the question whether internal headedness in a language could be regarded as a fairly arbitrary property, unconnected to the language’s other characteristics, or not.