For the types of virtual reality user interfaces, see Endocentric environment and Exocentric environment.
In theoretical linguistics, a distinction is made between endocentric and exocentric constructions. A grammatical construction (e.g. a phrase or compound word) is said to be endocentric if it fulfills 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] Such a distinction is possible only in phrase structure grammars (constituency grammars), since in dependency grammars all constructions are necessarily endocentric.[3]