Editing Head-marking language (section)

==Noun phrases and verb phrases==
The distinction between head-marking and dependent-marking shows the most in noun phrases and verb phrases, which have significant variation among and within languages.<ref>The [[World Atlas of Language Structures]] is dedicated in part to documenting the distribution of head-marking and dependent-marking in noun and verb phrases among the world's languages.</ref>

::{| class="wikitable"
!Phrase type!!Head!!Dependents!!Global distribution map ([[World Atlas of Language Structures|WALS]])
|-
|[[Noun phrase]]||[[Noun]]s||[[adjective]]s, [[possessive]]s, [[relative clause]]s, etc.||[http://wals.info/feature/24A Marking in Possessive Noun Phrases]
|-
|[[Verb phrase]] (theory A)||[[Verb]]||[[verb argument]]s||[http://wals.info/feature/23A Marking in the Clause: Head-marking]
|-
|[[Verb phrase]] (theory B)||[[Subject (grammar)|Subject]]||[[verb]]s||[http://wals.info/feature/23A Marking in the Clause: Dependent-marking]
|}

Languages may be head-marking in verb phrases and dependent-marking in noun phrases, such as most [[Bantu languages]], or vice versa, and it has been argued that the subject rather than the verb is the head of a clause so "head-marking" is not necessarily a coherent typology. Still, languages that are head-marking in both noun and verb phrases are common enough to make the term useful for typological description.