relational grammar (RG)

A development of GENERATIVE LINGUISTIC thinking of the mid-1970s which takes as central the notion of GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS (such as SUBJECT and OBJECT), rather than the categorial terms of standard PHRASE-MARKERS (e.g. NP, VP). TRANSFORMATIONS in this view are replaced by operations performed on unordered RELATIONAL networks – and formal representations of SENTENCES which show the grammatical relations that elements of a sentence bear to each other, and the syntactic level(s) at which these relations hold. The approach is in marked contrast with most other versions of generative grammar, where the emphasis is on SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES such as NP and VP, and on LINEAR ORDERING, syntactic relations being specifiable only derivatively.