sintaktis

Syntaktis, or syntax, is the branch of linguistics that studies the rules and principles governing the structure of sentences. It analyzes how words combine into phrases and how these phrases are organized into hierarchical, interconnected representations. The focus is on constituency, word order, grammatical relations, and the ways in which meaning emerges from sentence structure. Syntaktis seeks to describe the underlying rules that permit speakers to produce and understand an infinite set of sentences.

Historically, syntaktis has roots in ancient grammars and scholastic analysis, but it became a central discipline of modern linguistics in the 20th century. The development of formal theories—such as generative grammar and its successors—emphasized abstract structures and rules rather than surface word order alone. Other approaches include dependency grammar, which centers on binary relationships between words, and construction grammar, which links form and meaning within conventional pairings of form with syntax.

Key concepts in syntaktis include phrase structure, constituents, syntactic categories (such as noun, verb, and adjective), movement and transformations, binding and anaphora, and the distinction between deep and surface structure in some theories. Researchers also study cross-linguistic variation, typology, and the cognitive processes involved in real-time sentence processing. Syntaktis has broad applications, from language teaching and description to natural language processing, parsing algorithms, and computational linguistics, where formal models of syntax support tasks like parsing, translation, and language understanding.