Syntactic

Syntactic is an adjective meaning related to syntax, the set of rules that govern the structure of sentences in a language. In linguistics, syntax studies how words group into phrases, the hierarchical organization of clauses, and the relationships between elements such as heads, complements, and modifiers. Syntactic theory seeks to describe how sentences are formed and interpreted, and it contrasts with semantics (meaning) and phonology (sound). Core concerns include constituency, word order, agreement, subcategorization, and movement phenomena like wh-extraction and topicalization. Syntactic analysis focuses on the structure that underlies surface sentence forms, and it relies on formal representations such as tree structures and dependency relations.

In formal languages and computer science, syntactic rules define the structure of expressions and programs. A programming language's grammar specifies permissible sequences of tokens and the parse trees produced by a parser. Syntactic correctness means code adheres to the grammar, while semantic correctness concerns what the code does. Context-free grammars, pushdown automata, and various parsing algorithms (e.g., LL and LR parsers) model the process of syntactic analysis. The term syntactic sugar describes language features that improve readability without changing the underlying behavior. Syntactic ambiguity can arise when a string can be parsed in more than one valid way, in natural language and in programming.

Etymology: from Latin syntaxis, via Greek sunaxis, meaning 'arrangement put together.'