In linguistics, relational grammar (RG) is a syntactic theory which argues that primitive grammatical relations provide the ideal means to state syntactic rules in universal terms.
Other constituents (such as oblique, genitive, and object of comparative) are called nonterms (N).
According to Geoffrey K. Pullum (1977),[1] the GR hierarchy directly corresponds to the accessibility hierarchy: A schematic representation of a clause in this formalism might look like: One of the components of RG theory is a set of linguistic universals stated in terms of the numbered roles presented above.
Such a universal is the stratal uniqueness law, which states that there can be at most one 1, 2, and 3 per stratum.
After the discovery of such languages, he retracted his prior statements.