percolation (n.)

In GRAMMAR, a process whereby a feature associated with the HEAD of a CONSTRUCTION comes to be associated with the construction as a whole; also called trickling. It has come to be used chiefly in GENERATIVE MORPHOLOGY for the analysis of WORDS in terms of heads. For example, in a word like goodness, it is the -ness AFFIX which gives NOUN status to the word as a whole (not the other constituent, good, which is ADJECTIVAL). The affix therefore has to be seen as the head and assigned to the noun category. As a consequence, this category has to percolate through to the word as a whole (analogous to the way that a head noun in a phrase confers noun PHRASE status on the whole phrase). Various feature percolation conventions have been proposed.