![]() In Japanese, such "gapping" must proceed in the reverse order: "Bob mother for some flowers and father for tie bought". In the world's languages, it is common to avoid repetition between coordinated clauses by optionally deleting a constituent common to the two parts, as in "Bob bought his mother some flowers and his father a tie", where the second bought is omitted. Head-finality prevails also when sentences are coordinated instead of subordinated. Translating the phrase "the man who was walking down the street" into Japanese word order would be "street down walking was man". In sentences that have other sentences as constituents, the subordinated sentences (relative clauses, for example), always precede what they refer to, since they are modifiers and what they modify has the syntactic status of phrasal head. Head-finality in Japanese sentence structure carries over to the building of sentences using other sentences. ![]() By contrast, the Japanese language is consistently head-final: Moreover, genitive phrases can be either head-initial or head-final in English. Looking at the preceding list, English for example is mostly head-initial, but nouns follow the adjectives which modify them. Some languages are inconsistent in constituent order, having a mixture of head-initial phrase types and head-final phrase types. noun modified by an adjective ("black cat").comparison (" bigger than Y", i.e., "compared to Y, X is big"). ![]()
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