Head-final

Gradient classification

Some scholars, such as Tesnière, argue that there are no absolute head-initial or head-final languages. According to this approach, it is true that some languages have more head-initial or head-final elements than other languages do, but almost any language contains both head-initial and head-final elements. Therefore, rather than being classifiable into fixed categories, languages can be arranged on a continuum with head-initial and head-final as the extremes, based on the frequency distribution of their dependency directions. This view was supported in a study by Haitao Liu (2010), who investigated 20 languages using a dependency treebank-based method. For instance, Japanese is close to the head-final end of the continuum, while English and German, which have mixed head-initial and head-final dependencies, are plotted in relatively intermediate positions on the continuum.