Finding Something to Lean On

Phrases in a number of syntactic contexts are required, in a variety of languages, to end in their heads. This article offers a unified theory of the relevant properties of these contexts and of why the phenomena in question, while widespread, are not completely universal. The theory makes use of proposals made independently in CONTIGUITY THEORY (Richards 2010, 2016): the relevant syntactic contexts are argued to involve a prosodically dependent element that must attach prosodically to the head of the phrase to its immediate left, and this attachment is often blocked if the phrase in question is not head-final.