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Syntax, in linguistics, is the study of how words combine to form phrases and sentences. It concerns the rules and patterns that govern sentence structure, the hierarchical organization of constituents, and the relationships between elements such as subjects, verbs, and objects. Syntax is distinct from morphology, which studies word formation and inflection, and from semantics, which concerns meaning. Descriptive and cross-linguistic, it aims to describe how languages actually work, without prescribing how they should be.

The core objects of syntax are constituents and their order, agreement, and case marking. Theories of syntax propose abstract structures such as phrase structure trees or dependency graphs that encode which words group together and how they relate to each other. Common concepts include constituency, movement (such as forming questions or relative clauses), agreement between words (number, gender), and the functional roles of phrases (subject, predicate, object). Different languages exhibit diverse word orders, but many share underlying universal tendencies, such as the encoding of argument structure and hierarchical phrasing.

Applications of syntactic theory include language education, computational linguistics, and natural language processing. Syntactic parsers analyze sentence structure, while syntax informs parsing, machine translation, and voice assistants. In linguistics, syntax intersects with psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics to study how people acquire, process, and represent sentence structure in the brain. Research continues to explore the diversity of grammars, the interface with semantics, and the cognitive basis of language.