Grammatical relation

A grammatical relation is a syntactic relationship between sentence elements, such as subject, object, or oblique. It is distinct from the semantic roles those elements express.

Subject (grammar): A grammatical relation commonly associated with the topic or agent of a clause and with distinctive syntactic behavior. Subjects are a central example of a grammatical relation.
Morphological case: Inflectional marking on a noun phrase that signals its grammatical or semantic function. Case endings can distinguish relations such as subject and object.
Dependency grammar: A syntactic framework that represents sentence structure through directed relations between words. Dependency analyses encode relations directly between a head and its dependents.
Ergativity: A grammatical alignment in which the subject of an intransitive clause patterns with the object of a transitive clause. Ergative languages challenge familiar assumptions about subject and object groupings.
Direct object: A grammatical relation typically borne by a clause element directly affected by, or otherwise selected by, a verb. Direct objects illustrate how relations distinguish complements within a clause.
Agreement (linguistics): A grammatical dependency in which one word matches features of another, such as person, number, or gender. Agreement often identifies which noun phrase bears a privileged relation.
Phrase structure grammar: A family of syntactic theories that represent sentences as nested constituents. Phrase structure treats relations through constituent positions rather than only word-to-word links.
Split ergativity: A system in which a language uses different alignment patterns in different grammatical contexts. It shows that relation patterns can vary within one language.
Oblique argument: An argument expressed in a less central grammatical form, often marked by an adposition or oblique case. Obliques show that grammatical relations extend beyond subjects and objects.
Word order: The linear arrangement of words and phrases in a language. Fixed word order can signal relations when case marking is limited.

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