NP1
NP2
Subject
Object
•
Positional
relation,
or
WORD
ORDER,
refers
to
the
sequential
arrangement
of
words
in
a
language.
•
If the words in a sentence fail to occur in a fixed order required by the convention of a language,
one tends to produce an utterance either ungrammatical or nonsensical at all. For example,
The boy kicked the ball
–
*Boy the ball kicked the
–
*The ball kicked the boy
•
The teacher saw the students
•
The students saw the teacher
•
Positional relations are a manifestation of one aspect of Syntagmatic Relations observed by F.
de Saussure.
–
They are also called Horizontal Relations or simply Chain Relations.