Possible word orders are blurred into paths of the automaton network. As a linguistic description this is not satisfying and a new way for describing the word order should be found. The second major problem is that lexical knowledge is stated in two places. At present automaton descriptions work as a kind of valency lexicons which give the possible dependents of each word-category. But it is obvious that this information should be given separately in the lexicon.
Syntactic functions are the main objects that are created by the dependency relations.
Case role labels are further interpretations of these functional relations. The relationship is transitive, irreflexive and antisymmetric. A dependency relation is said to hold between two elements in certain circumstances. The governor expects to find certain types of dependents in its neighbourhood. This expectation is inherent to the element that constitutes the governor, and may be a piece of dictionary knowledge.