Abstract
Headedness is a central concept in morphological theory, referring to the element within a complex word that determines its grammatical category and core semantic interpretations. The notion of the head has been widely applied to compounding and to some extent affixation, but its status in reduplication remains obscure. This study investigates the manifestation of headedness across three major word formation processes- compounding, affixation and reduplication in Eggon- and also tries to evaluate whether a unified account of morphological headedness is attainable. Data is sourced from introspection, observation and documented sources and analysed descriptively using construction morphology. The findings show that compounding in Eggon obey both the Right-Hand Head Rule and the Left-Hand Head Rule. That is, any of the constituents that determines the meaning and word class serve as the head. In affixation, the affix serves as the head because it determines the word class of the derived word. The reduplicate serves as head in reduplication because it determines the meaning and syntactic category of the reduplicated word. This research argues that headedness is not uniformly manifested across the three major word formation processes of compounding, affixation and reduplication in Eggon. In compounding, any of the constituent that determines the syntactic category of the entire compound is the head. The prefix is the head in affixation and the reduplicate is the head in reduplication. Each word formation process may require a process-specific theoretical concept. This finding contributes to the universality and limitation of morphological headedness in linguistic theory.
Key words: Headedness, Morphology, Complex words,
Compounding, Affixation, Reduplication, Eggon
DOI: 10.36349/alqajolls.2026.v01i02.013
author/Garba, Patience Ashesla
journal/AL-QALAM JLLS 1(2) | June 2026
