headflagging

Headflagging is a term occasionally used in linguistic typology to describe a pattern in which the syntactic head of a phrase encodes or signals grammatical information about the phrase as a whole. The concept emphasizes the head’s role as the primary carrier of morphosyntactic features that interact with dependent material, rather than focusing solely on the marking of dependents or a fixed cross-linguistic system of affixes.

The idea is related to, yet distinct from, traditional notions of head-marking and dependent-marking. In headflagging descriptions, the head itself bears markers that correlate with properties of other elements in the clause—such as agreement with multiple dependents, clause type, or evidential stance—creating a signaling pattern that ties the head’s morphology to broader syntactic or discourse functions. This contrasts with languages where all agreement or case marking is concentrated on nouns (dependent-marking) or on the head alone but not in a way that coordinates across the phrase (somehead-marking accounts).

The term is not widely standardized and remains a topic of theoretical discussion rather than an established typological category. Proponents suggest it can capture cross-linguistic patterns where the head’s morphology provides a compact cue to the grammatical configuration of the entire clause, while critics caution that it risks overlapping with existing concepts like head-marking or mood and evidentiality markers.

See also: linguistic typology, head-marking, dependent-marking, morphosyntax.