In more formal terms, the distribution of an endocentric construction is functionally equivalent, or approaching equivalence, to one of its parts, which serves as the center, or head, of the whole.
12.
Both of the above types of compounds are called endocentric compounds because the semantic head is contained within the compound itself a blackboard is a type of board, for example, and a footstool is a type of stool.
13.
"' An endocentric compound "'consists of a " head ", i . e . the categorical part that contains the basic meaning of the whole compound, and modifiers, which restrict this meaning.
14.
Endocentric compounds tend to be of the same part of speech ( word class ) as their head, as in the case of " doghouse " . ( Such compounds were called " tatpuruc a " in the Sanskrit tradition .)
15.
The difficulty with this argument, however, is that the traditional endocentric vs . exocentric distinction did not foresee the existence of multi-headed structures, which means that it did not provide a guideline for deciding whether a multi-headed structure should be viewed as endo-or exocentric.
16.
The upper tree on the right, in contrast, is exocentric, because neither of the parts projects its category status up to the mother node; Z is a category distinct from X or Y . The two dependency trees show the manner in which dependency-based structures are inherently endocentric.
