Grammatical relation

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Some languages are very free in the positions that parts of speech can occupy within grammatical or 'correct' sentences.
Their syntax may be loose but through one method or another, semantic relationships are nonetheless reliably fixed
such that users mostly agree on what a particular sentence will mean.

Languages that are less free are said to have a more fixed syntax, but again, one way or another, grammatically correct sentences
express a fairly clear meaning as a result of their word ordering or syntactic functions. Among the tasks linguists pursue is the discovery of these functions within general theories of language, or for the understanding of a particular language.

A language such as English has a fair number of constraints. For example:

• generally a head that is a single word follows its modifier(s)
• prefixes modify the following head; affixes modify the preceding head; infixes modify the surrounding head
• a preposition usually precedes its object and relates to its case function
• subjects (when present) usually precede their predicates (when present).
• adverbs generally precede verbs or adjectives; adjectives generally precede nouns; etc.

The above shows a general left→right pattern, which, not co-incidentally, is also how English is read.
This also fits with the general English sentence pattern of subject→verb→object.
This precedence relation also allies with an over-arching functional dominance, that can be expressed both informally
(descriptively or philosophically) or formally (logically, mathematically or algorithmically).

References

• Wikipedia: exocentric, endocentric, algorithm
• Function: Computing, Philosophy, Logic, etc.
• Further references and ideas about function can be found in its disambiguation page.

Academic references

• Minsky, Rizzi, Chomsky LGB, PSGs, Construction Grammar, etc.