Editing Dependency grammar (section)

===Morphological dependencies===
Morphological dependencies obtain between words or parts of words.<ref>Concerning morphological dependencies, see Melʹc̆uk (2003:193ff.).</ref> When a given word or part of a word influences the form of another word, then the latter is morphologically dependent on the former. Agreement and concord are therefore manifestations of morphological dependencies. Like semantic dependencies, morphological dependencies can overlap with and point in the same direction as syntactic dependencies, overlap with and point in the opposite direction of syntactic dependencies, or be entirely independent of syntactic dependencies. The arrows are now used to indicate morphological dependencies.

[[File:Mophological dependencies 1.png|center|Morphological dependencies 1]]

The plural ''houses'' in (a) demands the plural of the demonstrative determiner, hence ''these'' appears, not ''this'', which means there is a morphological dependency that points down the hierarchy from ''houses'' to ''these''. The situation is reversed in (b), where the singular subject ''Sam'' demands the appearance of the agreement suffix ''-s'' on the finite verb ''works'', which means there is a morphological dependency pointing up the hierarchy from ''Sam'' to ''works''. The type of determiner in the German examples (c) and (d) influences the inflectional suffix that appears on the adjective ''alt''. When the indefinite article ''ein'' is used, the strong masculine ending ''-er'' appears on the adjective. When the definite article ''der'' is used, in contrast, the weak ending ''-e'' appears on the adjective. Thus since the choice of determiner impacts the morphological form of the adjective, there is a morphological dependency pointing from the determiner to the adjective, whereby this morphological dependency is entirely independent of the syntactic dependencies. Consider further the following French sentences:

[[File:Morphological dependencies 2'.png|center|Morphological dependencies 2']]

The masculine subject ''le chien'' in (a) demands the masculine form of the predicative adjective ''blanc'', whereas the feminine subject ''la maison'' demands the feminine form of this adjective. A morphological dependency that is entirely independent of the syntactic dependencies therefore points again across the syntactic hierarchy.

Morphological dependencies play an important role in [[Linguistic typology|typological studies]]. Languages are classified as mostly [[Head-marking language|head-marking]] (''Sam work-s'') or mostly [[Dependent-marking language|dependent-marking]] (''these houses''), whereby most if not all languages contain at least some minor measure of both head and dependent marking.<ref>The distinction between head- and dependent-marking was established by Nichols (1986). Nichols was using a dependency-based understanding of these distinctions.</ref>