Journal of Languages, Linguistics and Literary Studies (JOLLS) Http://www.jolls.com.ng Vol. 9. June 2019 ISSN : 2636-7149-6300 (online & print) Chinedu Nwadinobi Anyanwu CC BY-NC-ND Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 216 A Syntactic Study of Lexical Heads in Kuce: A Principles and Parameters Approach Chinedu Nwadinobi Anyanwu Department of Linguistics and Nigerian Languages, University of Jos,, Plateau State, Nigeria Abstract This paper describes the noun and verb phrases of the Kuce language with the aim of examining the operation of the Head Parameter principle in the language within the framework of Principles and Parameters, a sub-theory of Universal Grammar. The Head Parameter is assigned two values: head-first and head-last, with respect to the position of a lexical head in a phrase. The principle is hinged on the proposal that once a language selects a given value, all head categories in the language are expected to consistently select their complements in the same direction. This study employed the qualitative research methodology, as the data were collected from the native speakers of Kuce with the use of a researcher- designed wordlist, West African Linguistic Society’s questionnaire and unstructured oral interview. The data were then subjected to descriptive content analysis. From the investigation, the paper’s major finding was that Kuce is a head-first language in that all lexical and functional heads are consistently positioned before their complements at D-structure. It was also discovered that complements in Kuce are internal modifiers of the head element and show a high degree of cohesion with their governing heads, while adjuncts are external modifiers and show a less degree of cohesion with their governing heads. On the basis of these findings, the paper concluded that the operation of the Head Parameter principle in Kuce is very strict, and that the canonical structure of the language’s phrases justifies the typological findings with respect to Head Parameter cross-linguistically. Keywords: Syntactic Analysis, Noun Phrase, Verb Phrase, Kuce, Head Parameter, Principles and Parameters Theory 1. Introduction Grammatical analysis, over the past few decades, has been centred on the development of an approach to the study of human language whose major goal is to set the parameters of Universal Grammar (UG). A crucial innovation of the concept of phrase structure that emerged in the early 1970’s was the claim that all phrases have a central element, known as a head, around which other elements of the phrase revolve and which can minimally stand for the whole phrase. For example, the VP drew an elephant has a head verb drew; the NP the child has a head noun child; a PP such as by the manager has a head preposition by; and so on. The aim behind this, as always, is to express generalizations about the phrase structure of all human languages rather than features that are idiosyncratic to one part of language or to a single language. An important aspect of language variation concerns the location of the head in relation to other elements of the phrase called complements. The head of the phrase can occur on the left of a complement or on its right. Cook(1988, p. 9) argues that the relative position of heads and complements are specified once for all phrases in a given language. Rather than a long list of individual rules specifying the position of the head in each phrase type, a single generalization suffices: ‘heads are last in the phrase’ or ‘heads are first in the phrase’. The variation in the order of elements amounts to a choice between head-first and head-last. UG captures this variation between languages in terms of a limited choice between two possibilities as the Head Parameter. The Head- position (or directionality) Parameter is basically a dimension along which languages differ in terms of their grammatical structure. In the light of the above discussion, this paper carries out a descriptive study of the noun and verb phrases of the Kuce language spoken in Plateau Statewith