Relatsioonilises

Relatsioonilises is the Estonian adjective meaning “relational” or “in terms of relations.” It is used to describe phenomena, models, or theories that emphasize connections between entities rather than the properties of the entities alone. The term appears across disciplines to indicate that understanding depends on the relationships involved.

In linguistics, relatsiooniline approaches focus on grammatical relations among sentence constituents, such as subject, object, and indirect object, rather than solely on hierarchical phrase structure. Relational grammar as a framework analyzes how arguments participate in events and how their roles are signaled by morphology or word order. The idea is that meaning and grammatical patterns arise from relations among elements.

In information technology and data management, the relational paradigm organizes data into relations, typically expressed as tables, and uses keys to establish connections between them. A relational database stores information in rows and columns, with relationships between tables defined to support queries, constraints, and data integrity. This use of relations is central to how data is modeled and retrieved.

In logic and mathematics, relational concepts describe properties or operations that depend on pairs or sets of objects, such as order, adjacency, or equivalence. In philosophy and social sciences, relational thinking emphasizes interdependencies and contextual factors, arguing that some properties or identities only make sense in relation to other entities.

See also: relational database, relational grammar, binary relation.