In theoretical linguistics, a distinction is made between endocentric and exocentric constructions. A grammatical construction (for instance, a phrase or compound) is said to be endocentric if it fulfils the same linguistic function as one of its parts, and exocentric if it does not.[1] The distinction reaches back at least to Bloomfield's work of the 1930s,[2] who based it on terms by Pāṇini and Patañjali in Sanskrit grammar.[3] Such a distinction is possible only in phrase structure grammars (constituency grammars), since in dependency grammars all constructions are necessarily endocentric.[4]