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endocentric and exocentric constructions （向心结构和离心结构）

2007-12-04 13:12阅读：

http://blog.sina.cn/dpool/blog/u/1249673814

下面是我们今天早上讨论的两个概念，来自：http://www.answers.com/。请大家浏览，看是否有更加清晰的理解。

endocentric
In linguistics, an endocentric construction is a grammatical construction that fulfills the same linguistic function as one of its constituents. An endocentric construction consists of an obligatory head and one or more optional, dependent words, whose presence serve to narrow the meaning of the head. For example, the phrase
'lion house' is an endocentric construction. In this case, 'house' is the head, because it carries the bulk of the semantic content and determines the grammatical category to which the whole constituent will be assigned. Likewise, 'lion' here is the dependent, specifying what sort of house is being referred to in the whole construction. In more formal terms, the distribution of an endocentric construction is functionally equivalent, or approaching equivalence, to one of its member constituents, which serves as the centre, or head, of the whole. An endocentric construction is also known as a headed construction, where the head is contained 'inside' the construction.

exocentric
In linguistics, it refers to phrases and compound words which are not the same part of speech as their constituents.
For example, in the sentence 'I am in the doghouse', the phrase 'in the doghouse' is an exocentric phrase, since it functions as an adjective (similar to the 'tired' in 'I am tired'), not as a preposition or noun, which is what its constituents 'in' and 'house' are. The word 'shortcoming' is also exocentric, since it is a noun, but its two constituents are an adjective and a verb.

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