A morpheme that cannot stand
alone, but must form part of a larger word, like plural -s,un-, or -ness. In contrast, free morphemes, like
cat or happy, can stand alone. A trailing hyphen
indicates that a bound morpheme is a prefix; a leading hyphen indicates
a suffix.
Various syntactic operations can change the grammatical function of
a noun phrase. Depending on whether a noun phrase moves "up" or "down"
the hierarchy in (1), the noun phrase is said to be promoted
or demoted. For instance, the passive in English demotes the
subject of an active sentence to the object of the preposition
by. In addition, it promotes the the object to subject.
Second, the head of a movement chain
is simply the highest element in
the chain. In the case of verb movement, the head in the chain sense
happens to be a head in the X' sense. But when a maximal projection
moves, the head of the chain is a maximal projection.
Third, the term head can refer to the noun that is modified
by a relative clause. Given our analysis of relative clauses as
involving wh- movement, and hence a chain (see
Chapter 8), this usage is
potentially especially confusing. In the relative clauses in (i),
the head of the relative clause in this third sense is italicized,
whereas the head of the chain formed by movement of the relative clause
is underlined.