Positionally

Positionally is an English adverb formed from the adjective positional. It denotes a manner related to position, location, or indexing. In general usage it is less common than phrases like “in terms of position,” but it appears in technical writing to emphasize spatial or sequence-based relationships. Its etymology follows the standard derivation from position plus the adverbial suffix -ally.

In linguistics and related fields, positionally is used to describe phenomena tied to the position of an element within a structure, such as a string, utterance, or syntactic tree. For example, a feature might be described as positionally conditioned by an element’s place in a sequence. In computer science and data analysis, the term can describe encodings or features defined by index or order, such as positionally encoded attributes in a vector.

In other disciplines, the word may appear in discussions of detectors, experiments, or models where outcomes depend on location or order. Because positionally is uncommon outside specialized contexts, many writers prefer phrases like “in terms of position” or “position-based” to convey the meaning more clearly.

See also: positional, positional numeral system, positional encoding.