Syntaktiikka

Syntaktiikka is the study of the structure of sentences in natural languages. It examines how words combine to form phrases and how hierarchical organization yields grammatical sentences. It is concerned with the allowable arrangements of linguistic units, the rules that govern sentence formation, and how meaning arises from structure.

Key topics include phrase structure, constituency, syntactic categories (e.g., noun, verb, adjective), functional categories like tense, complementizers, and discussion of subordination, coordination, movement, and transformations. It also covers cross-linguistic variation in word order and case marking, agreement, and grammatical relations like subject and object.

Approaches range from traditional grammar to modern theoretical frameworks such as phrase structure grammars, dependency grammar, X-bar theory, and the Minimalist Program in generative linguistics. Syntaktiikka often investigates the syntax-semantics interface, the role of morphology, and how sentence structure is represented in mental representations and in computational models.

In Finnish linguistics, syntaktiikka is the term used for syntax and is studied with attention to rich inflection, flexible word order, and agglutinative morphology. The field combines descriptive analysis of languages with formal modeling and psycholinguistic and corpus-based methods to understand how humans process and produce syntactic structures.