Cumulativity Sample Clauses

Cumulativity. Before concluding this section, I briefly discuss why headedness is a cumulative property. Headedness is cumulative in the sense that it only adds to the existing properties of an element. A foot head has all the properties of a foot, in addition to the property of being a head, and the same applies to syllable heads in prosodic theories and to feature heads. Being a head cannot deprive an element from its other properties, nor does it create a new “constituent.” This is a fundamental assumption of φ-Correspondence. To make heads constituents, I would have to postulate a different (interpretable) property for each of the properties compatible with headedness (e.g., [+sib]+H vs. [+sib]-H, σ+H vs. σ-H, and so on.). In addition to basically doubling up on the number of interpretable properties, such a theory would have several other consequences: constraints that refer to an element with an interpretable property (e.g., feet or a feature node) refer to all elements with those properties, regardless of their head status. For example, IDENT-IO([+sib]) is violated by heads and non-heads alike. Precedence is also blind to headedness because heads are ordered with respect to elements with the same interpretable and derivational property.