Syntaxen

Syntaxen is the study of how words combine to form phrases and sentences and the rules that govern this structure. In linguistics, it concerns the arrangement of constituents, such as noun phrases and verb phrases, and how different word orders express grammatical relationships. It is distinguished from morphology, which studies word formation, and from semantics, which studies meaning. The syntactic structure of a sentence is often represented as a hierarchical tree, with a sentence (S) at the top and progressively smaller units such as NP and VP.

Different theoretical approaches describe these structures differently, from phrase-structure grammars to dependency grammars and to functional or minimalist accounts. Syntax interacts with phonology and semantics and is essential for predicting which word sequences are acceptable in a given language.

In programming and formal languages, syntax refers to the rules that determine how programs must be written to be valid. A language's syntax can be defined by a formal grammar, often described using Backus–Naur form or similar notation. Parsers analyze source code to detect syntactic errors, which must be fixed before semantics can be evaluated. Syntax in this sense is separate from meaning, though incorrect syntax can lead to unintended behavior.

In everyday usage, syntax is used to describe the conventions of sentence structure in a language. Different languages exhibit varying orders of subject, verb, and object, and stylistic choices can influence syntactic form. The study of syntax thus spans descriptive linguistics, language teaching, natural language processing, and programming languages.