Segments can be labelled according to their syntactic function, such as Subject, Object, Adjunct,.... Examples of this layer of information are found in the SUSANNE and TOSCA phrase structure annotations and in the ENGCG dependency annotation . It shows that syntactic functions, together with dependency relations, may be annotated without bracketing, which means that the functions are assigned to words rather than to constituents. The @-symbol indicates a syntactic label (e.g. @OBJ designates Object). The arrows > and < indicate dependency relations; for details see above.
Indicating syntactic functions overlaps with (c) -- dependency analysis -- to some extent. For example, the dependent-head relation between adjective and noun in wild flowers may be alternatively considered a matter of assigning syntactic function labels to wild (modifier) and flowers (head). However, these two types of annotation would be shown to be different if we took an example of a noun followed by a prepositional phrase: bottles of wine. Here, in a functional labelling of constituents, the whole prepositional phrase of wine would be a modifier of bottles; whereas in a dependency analysis, the word of would be the dependent of the head bottles, and the noun wine in turn would be a dependent of of.