Dependency-based approaches, which understand the verb as the center of the sentence structure and describe this structure on the basis of binary relations between heads and their modifiers, have been for a long time a matter of Continental syntactic theories rather than of the mainstream syntactic approaches on the other side of the Atlantic.
the notion of head can be found also in Bloomfield (1933) when referring to the names of the main constituents of the sentence, that is, NP (noun phrase, with N as its head) and VP (verb phrase, with V as its head).