The Role of Heads in Linguistic Theories

There's no such thing as a purely headmarking language or purely dependent marking. They're strong tendencies, but nothing is pure. You can have mixed systems that are sort of like, have these mixed. Like Bontu languages are very strongly headmarking on the verb but dependent marking in the noun system. And another reason why we can usually clearly distinguish what a head and a dependent are is because in general, a language is pretty strongly one or the other with some exceptions.