Examples
Languages typically construct phrases with a head word (or nucleus) and zero or more dependents (modifiers). The following phrases show the phrase heads in bold.
Examples of left-branching phrases (= head-final phrases):
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- the house
- very happy
- too slowly
Examples of right-branching phrases (= head-initial phrases):
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- laugh loudly
- with luck
- that it happened
Examples of phrases that contain both left- and right-branching (= head-medial phrases):
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- the house there
- very happy with it
- only laugh loudly
The syntactic structures of most languages combine left- and right-branching, although most languages tend to favor the one or the other.
Read more about this topic: Branching (linguistics)
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—G.C. (Georg Christoph)
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—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)