Relationellen

Relationellen is a term used in linguistics to describe a class of linguistic elements that encode relations between entities rather than intrinsic properties of single entities. The concept sits within relational or predicate-logic–inspired semantic frameworks and focuses on how forms express dependencies, comparisons, or spatial, temporal, or causal relations.

In this framework, relationellen include relational adjectives and nouns, prepositions that encode a relation (such as between, around, or alongside), and certain verbal constructs whose meaning is determined primarily by the relation they express. The study of relationellen often employs formal representations such as predicate-argument structures or binary-relational frames and can be applied in computational parsing, semantic annotation, or multilingual NLP.

The term is not universally adopted and appears mainly in specific theoretical writings that emphasize relational content in language. Critics argue that the label can be vague and that relationellen overlap with established notions of relational predicates and argument structure. Proponents contend that the label helps foreground relation-based meaning in cross-linguistic comparison and in multilingual processing systems.

Relationellen are typically contrasted with attributive properties, which describe inherent features of a referent, and with relational verbs that encode actions or states more than the relations themselves. They are also discussed in connection with broader topics in semantics, including spatial and temporal semantics, event structure, and the mapping of syntactic form to relational meaning.