In linguistics, language expression is described at several levels:
sounds (phonetics),
groups of equivalent sounds which has a distinctive role (phonology),
longer sequences of sounds which carry a meaning or a function (morphems and words studied in morphology and lexicography),
rules how these morphems form utterances (sentences, discourse).
Syntax is the part of the description of language expression which in this traditional classification describes the top level of expression, that is how morphems and words form phrases, sentences. It is a part of a grammar.
In addition there is a relation to meaning and usage (semantics, pragmatics) which is often considered completely separate, though it is not in natural language.
Another term is a syntax as a discipline which studies syntax in above sense, often meant with emphasis on a well formed sentences. Syntax as a theoretical discipline also studies how these rules function and are derived (e.g. syntax part of generative and cognitive grammar).
Unlike syntax in the sense of formal logic and computer science, syntax in linguistics is thus not contrasted only to semantics but also to the description of lower level formations: sounds, lexical units. It usually does not include prosody, which is however also on the level of a phrase or sentence.
The following is from Tallerman (2020):
‘Syntax’ means ‘sentence construction’: how words group together to make phrases and sentences. Some people also use the term grammar to mean the same as syntax, although most linguists follow the more recent practice whereby the grammar of a language includes all of its organizing principles: information about the sound system, about the form of words, how we adjust language according to context, and so on; syntax is only one part of this grammar.
Related entries: syntax (in the senses of logics and computer science), grammar, linguistics
wikipedia syntax
Andre Martinet, A functional view of the language
Dubravko Škiljan, Pogled u lingvistiku
Noam Chomsky, Lectures on government and binding: the Pisa lectures
Noam Chomsky, The Minimalist Program, MIT Press
M. Tallerman, Understanding syntax (1sr ed.1998, 5th ed. 2020)
Last revised on December 23, 2022 at 17:55:32. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.