syntaxe

Syntaxe is the French term for syntax and is used in French-language discussions of language and programming. In English, the corresponding term is syntax. It denotes the set of rules that govern how units such as words and symbols are combined to form sentences, phrases, or programs.

In linguistics, syntaxe refers to the structure of sentences and how their parts relate to one another. It studies hierarchical organization, phrase structure, agreement, subcategorization, and movement. The field distinguishes syntax from phonology, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics. Descriptive theories describe actual language use, while formal approaches propose abstract rules that can generate all grammatical sentences.

Languages vary in their syntactic patterns. Some rely on fixed word order, others on inflectional morphology or case marking to signal grammatical relations. For example, English typically follows subject–verb–object order; Japanese often uses subject–object–verb order; Latin relied on case endings to express grammatical roles.

In computing, syntax defines the formal rules for constructing valid programs. A syntax error occurs when code violates these rules. Most programming languages are defined by a formal grammar, commonly expressed as context-free grammars, and are parsed by a compiler or interpreter. Examples include Python, which uses indentation to delimit blocks, and SQL, which prescribes a particular clause order.

Applications of syntaxe include language education, corpus linguistics, natural language processing, and the design and parsing of programming languages.