1. Oddly enough, he went home early.
2. Despite there not being many people at the party, we insisted on staying.
I try to find all the heads in the two sentences.
(Heads will roll.)
1. Let me think, it is phrases that have heads, is it not?
How many phrases are there in the first sentence?
2?
Or productum 6? (there are 6 words in the sentence)
'Oddly enough' is phrase. The head is 'odd', not oddly, because the head is to be a morpheme.
'he went home early' is a phrase.What is the head here? Went. Why? Because went, the morpheme
of which is went (the same), determines the syntactic function of the
phrase.
'enough, he went' Is it a phrase? I think so. what about this one? I do
not think it has syntactical function. So it is futile to speak about
the head of it.
Comments?
2. Despite there not being many people at the party, we insisted on staying.
Despite is a conjunctive adverbial, is it? It links two main clauses? Yes, I think.
First clause: 'Despite there not being many people at the party' What is the head?
be? Yes, because being determines the syntactic function of the phrase: noun, and it is a gerund phrase.
The head is 'be' because the lexeme 'being' has the morpheme 'be'. 'Was' is a morpheme too, is it not?
Does it mean 'was' is a head too in the phrase? No, I do not think so, because the tense should be the same.
Comments?