My Coming Book – Sample Chapter 2

Head Final – A Key to German Word Order

“head final” is a special linguistic term that is used to describe kind of an order-paradigm for words that constitute an entity. And just so you know – this was the most complicated sentence in the entire chapter, and you can pretty much ignore it, because I’ll explain everything.

“head final” is not exactly well known. Even people who are fluent in ‘Grammarese’ often haven’t heard of it and it pretty much never comes up in the context of German teaching.
But that’s a huge missed opportunity. Because the concept of head final is an unbelievably powerful help for understanding German word order.

And it’s not even difficult to understand.

Let’s take a simple noun: coffee.
This is enough to constitute an element or entity in a sentence.

• I don’t like [coffee].

But that’s very general, so let’s add in a bit more information about this coffee-entity.
Then, there are essentially two places where we can put it: before the main word, or after the main word.
Or in other words, head final (main word comes last), or head first (main word comes first).
An example for head first are for instance relative sentences.

• I like [coffee that is overpriced and sour].

And an example for head final is when we add adjectives to the coffee directly.

• I don’t like [sour, overpriced coffee].

The head of the noun-phrase, the coffee, comes after the adjectives, because that’s just how it is in English.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.
In French for example, the same sentence would look like this:

• I don’t like Americano.

Okay, that was my deep resentment against the concept Americano talking. You know… because I find it sour and overpriced.

Seriously though, here’s how the example would actually look like in French:

• Je n’aime pas [le café acide et trop cher].

Because in French, when you have a noun with an adjective, the noun (aka the head) typically comes first.
And in some languages like Italian or Portuguese, apparently both options work, each with their slightly distinct meanings.
There is no better or worse way, different languages just take different approaches.

So, now you know what head final means and that you’re already familiar with it because English uses the approach for nouns with adjectives.

But what does that have to do with German word order?
Well, take a look at this example:

• the much-discussed, overly long, wildly complicated, and notoriously difficult to understand book

Structurally speaking, this is the same thing as “sour, overpriced coffee“.
The heads (coffee, book) are at the end, with a bunch of qualifiers before them. The only difference is that the book example is much longer, and in order to know what is talked about, we kind of “have to wait till the end“.

I think you might have a hunch where this is actually going.

You see, this concept of a “head” is not limited to nouns. It can also be used for actions and verbs.
Let‘s imagine we‘re writing a to do list for the weekend.
In English, it might look like this:

• go shopping
• play piano
• drink a beer with Thomas
• study for the exam next week

Each item on the list is one activity and what we can see here is that the verb comes first and the specifications follow. So for activities, English uses the head first approach here.
And now let’s see how the exact same list would look like in German:

• shoppen gehen
• Klavier spielen
• mit Thomas ein Bier trinken
• für die Prüfung nächste Woche lernen

This is the natural way in German and no native speaker would ever write it in the order that English uses.
It looks like it’s English reversed but what’s actually going on is that German simply uses head final for verbal phrases, while English uses head first.

So German uses the same approach that English uses for nouns with adjectives. For a German a verb phrase like “mit Thomas über das neue Projekt reden” is just as effortless and normal as a noun phrase like “the overly long and notoriously boring meeting” is for a native speaker of English.

Now, of course that doesn’t mean that the German approach to verbs now has to feel natural or that you’re not allowed to be confused by it. It’s different from what you’re used to, so of course it feels weird and of course you can get confused. But it’s not entirely new. It’s a concept you’re familiar with, used in a new place.

And understanding this idea of head final and how German uses it for its verbs can help us make sense of various aspects of German word order and sentence structure.
I don’t want to go into all of it here, but what particularly matters for us as we talk about the grammar separable prefix verbs is the whole “verb at the end” thing.

Because the verb or parts of the verb going to the end of a sentence in German doesn’t mean that they leave their “normal” place to go to that far far away land at the end.
What it really means is that the part of the verb is “going home from work”.
Let’s do an example:

• am Sonntag mit Thomas Schach spielen
• play chess with Thomas on Sunday

This is just a verbal phrase, as we’d put it on a to-do list. The verb (the head) sits at the end in German and at the beginning in English, and the other elements are arranged based on where the head is.

Now, let’s see it as a sentence

• Ich spiele am Sonntag mit Thomas Schach.
• I‘m playing chess with Thomas on Sunday.

Sentences like these make it appear that German sentence structure is basically just like English, but with some random twists. In reality though, when you look at the order of elements, you can see that in German, they’re still ordered the way they were before in the to-do list version. Only the verb at the end is missing. That’s because the verb had to go to position 2 for “work“.
But now, let’s put this into past tense:

• Ich habe am Sonntag mit Thomas Schach gespielt.

Here, we have a second verb, the helper verb haben. It’s now the one basically taking on the “shift” at position 2 – and the other part of the verb gets to go home to the end.

I know this might sound a bit confusing even for advanced learners, because it’s usually not taught that way. But essentially, you can think of any German sentence as having a verb slot at the end – the verb’s “home”.
It can be empty sometimes because the verb is at work in position number two. But the slot at the end is still there, and if the verb or part of it doesn’t have to be at work, it’ll go home.

Now, of course we could explore this in much more depth, but that would be a bit out of the scope of this book. Maybe think of it as a region that you find on vacation while exploring something else and you think to yourself “Wow, this place looks really interesting. I definitely want to go there and explore at some point.”
There definitely are some hidden gems waiting that most mainstream learners of German don’t know about yet.

But now let’s get back to our actual topic – the separable prefix verbs.
In the next chapter, we’ll get a basic overview over their grammar, and you’ll see the effects of what we just learned – “head final for verbs” – on full display.

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