Syntaxis

Syntaxis is the study of how words are arranged to form meaningful sentences and phrases. The term traces to Greek syntaxis, from syn- “together” and tassein “to arrange,” and entered Latin as syntaxis. In modern usage, the field is usually called syntax, but syntaxis appears in some languages and in historical grammars.

Syntaxis analyzes rules and patterns that govern word order, grammatical agreement, case marking, and the relation of arguments to predicates (subcategorization or valency). It also concerns the organization of phrases into hierarchical structures (constituency) and phenomena such as movement, coordination, and subordination. Theories differ in how such structures are represented and how they are learned or processed: traditional grammars, generative syntax, dependency grammar, construction grammar, and functional approaches all offer different accounts of the same data.

Cross-linguistic research shows wide variation in permissible word orders and case systems, yet certain abstract principles—like the necessity of a finite verb and the presence of grammatical relations—recur across languages. Syntaxis informs language description, education, and natural language processing, where parsing algorithms rely on syntactic structures to interpret sentences.