On the Head of the Noun Phrase in Grammatical Theory

During the last four decades there has been a considerable debate on the ' headedness ' of the Noun Phrase (NP), i.e., whether in a pattern like : Determiner + Noun (D+N), e.g.,The book, D is the syntactic head or N.The various headship criteria sometimes pick out the determiner , sometimes the noun, and sometimes yield an indeterminate answer.So, it seems that the determination of the element that counts as 'Head' of the NP does not always prove simple.This is because syntactic and semantic ideas of 'what characterizes the whole ' do not always coincide.The examples have shown that D and N depend on each other .This means that either of them could be the 'Head' of the NP , i.e., there is a mutual dependency between them.