Grammatical Relation

Grammatical Relation

In linguistics, grammatical relations (= grammatical functions, grammatical roles, syntactic functions) refer to functional relationships between constituents in a clause. The standard examples of grammatical functions from traditional grammar are subject, direct object, and indirect object. Beyond these concepts from traditional grammar, more modern theories of grammar are likely to acknowledge many further types of grammatical relations (e.g. complement, specifier, predicative, etc.). The role of grammatical relations in theories of grammar is greatest in many dependency grammars, which tend to posit dozens of distinct grammatical relations. Every head-dependent dependency bears a grammatical function.