positionaladj.

?a1560 L. Digges Geom. Pract.: Pantometria (1571) i. xxxiv. sig. K iv The concourse or meeting of semblable positionall lines.

1646 Sir T. Browne Pseudodoxia Epidemica ii. vii. 102 A strange conceit,..ascribing unto plants positionall operations, and after the manner of the Loadstone. View more context for this quotation

1664 H. Power Exper. Philos. iii. 157 A Magnet..acquires a new one [sc. Magnetical vigour], according to the positional Laws in its Refrigeration.

1766 J. Buchanan Ess. Standard Pronunc. Eng. Lang. Positional.

1837 Times 18 Aug. 4/1 Nor is there anything more consolatory or more compensatory to Whig gentlemen at the bottom of polls, than their positional facilities for acquiring and proclaiming those clearer views of public questions which their successful rivals..are often unable to form.

1879 W. Thomson & P. G. Tait Treat. Nat. Philos. (new ed.) I: Pt. i. §343 A system so constituted that the positional forces are proportional to displacements and the motional to velocities.

1881 R. Ellis in Academy 9 Apr. 256/1 Why has not Mr. Butler..reproduced the Greek metre exactly, or at least with that positional quantity which seems most nearly to approach it?

1937 M. Euwe Strategy & Tactics in Chess 18 We call games such as the preceding one, in which strategy plays such an important part, positional games, in contrast to combinative games, in which the strategy is of minor importance.

1946 Sunday Disp. 8 Sept. 6/2 There was no weakness in United, who played clever positional football.

1971 Physics Bull. July 397/2 Three instruments incorporating laser interferometers for calibration have been built at NPL. The first of these, for measuring the positional errors of the lines on precision scales and gratings, has been in use for several years.

1980 P. Oquist in D. J. Whittaker Terrorism Reader (2002) xii. 169 The civil wars of the nineteenth century with their positional, battlefield warfare carried high death tolls.

2000 Econ. & Philos. 16 80 This is manifestly true when the dimensions on which we estimate agents are themselves either positional or comparative.

1908 T. G. Tucker Introd. Nat. Hist. Lang. 92 Languages which express grammar and modification of sense by position, without external or internal modification of the ‘roots’..may be called Inorganic or Positional.

1937 J. R. Firth Tongues of Men vii. 88 Three types of language structure: (i) Meanings indicated by words; relations by position... These were called Isolating and Positional Languages. E.g., Chinese, English.

1964 R. B. Lees Gram. Eng. Nominalizations p. xli Subcategorization is obviously a different kind of constraint on syntactic constituents from positional constraints in a tree or domination by a certain kind of node.

1999 Boston Globe (Nexis) 21 Nov. c5 In a positional language like ours—where the meaning depends more on word order than inflection—we expect sentences to unfold in the usual subject-verb-object order.

1930 Times 23 Apr. 6/2 The realization..of the huge extent of the universe came from observations much more closely allied to positional astronomy than to astrophysics.

2000 Canad. Jrnl. Hist. (Nexis) Aug. 408 The decisions here are for the most part dependent on cultural criteria, in particular regard (on the part of Flamsteed) for a tradition of classification in positional astronomy extending back to Ptolemy and Hipparchus.

1990 Science 6 July 181 The remaining alternative has been to identify the NF1 gene by positional cloning (formerly referred to as ‘reverse genetics’..though this may be a misleading designator).

2002 L. Andersson in K. Schellander et al. Genomics & Biotechnol. in Livestock Breeding 79 It is absolutely crucial in a positional cloning project to narrow down the chromosomal region harbouring the gene of interest as much as possible.

1976 F. Hirsch Social Limits to Growth iii. 27 The positional economy..relates to all aspects of goods, services, work positions, and other social relationships that are either (1) scarce in some absolute or socially imposed sense or (2) subject to congestion or crowding through more extensive use... If..positional goods remain in fixed supply while material goods become more plentiful, the price of positional goods will rise, as consumers' relative intensity of demand for them increases in terms of material goods.

1977 N.Y. Times Bk. Rev. 13 Feb. 10/3 ‘Positional goods’—a house at the shore, tenure on the Harvard faculty, a Picasso on the wall.

1992 Economist 26 Dec. 92/1 Unduly costly..products, which are no more (and maybe less) useful than their functional equivalents, are sometimes called ‘positional goods’: goods that are valued not despite their expense, but because of it.

1912 Times 26 Feb. 13/5 Positional play is strategy; the making of strokes is tactics.

1996 Lacrosse Talk Oct. 19/1 The Welsh team..matched the opposition in all quarters except for positional play and tactics.

1912 Times 26 Feb. 13/5 Inman is not a positional player in the sense of the term as applied to Diggle... The first-named will always make sure of the stroke in the first instance, trusting in his power of over-coming difficulties to rectify later on the awkwardness of the way in which the balls are disposed.

1933 M. A. Schwendemann tr. R. Reti Masters of Chess Board 4 Typical positional players like Steinitz and Rubinstein are of the opinion that this variation of the King's Gambit is in favour of White.

1987 Toronto Star (Nexis) 3 Dec. c1 The Giants had gone to the baseball meetings in Dallas next week to shop for a Butler-type player they would have been forced to give up a front-line positional player or pitcher.

2003 Boston Globe (Nexis) 28 Apr. c8 Bill Paschall of Jamaica Plain is now of international standing, a strong positional player and a threat to any grandmaster.

1649 W. Charleton tr. J. van Helmont Ternary of Paradoxes 10 The Aquilonary side, by friction of the point of a Compasse needle, positionally from the right hand to the left, endowes it with a verticall or polary faculty.

1923 C. D. Broad Sci. Thought xi. 408 Some of these strands may be positionally uniform.

1964 Amer. Speech 39 35 The main adjective class is positionally any word that goes either as a prepositive or as a complement of a copulative.

1975 Nature 31 Jan. 310/2 The molecules are positionally ordered but orientationally disordered and mobile.

2004 N.Y. Times (National ed.) 22 Feb. viii. 12/5 White must play positionally, at least at the beginning.