Positional relation For language to fulfill its communicative function, it must have a way to mark the grammatical roles of the various phrases that can occur in a clause ■ The boy kicked the ball 时 NP1 NP2 Subiect ObjectPositional Relation ◼ For language to fulfill its communicative function, it must have a way to mark the grammatical roles of the various phrases that can occur in a clause. ◼ The boy kicked the ball NP1 NP2 Subject Object