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 (morphology),
rules on how these morphemes 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 morphemes 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 form the final and higher levels of expression.
Another term is a syntax as a discipline which studies syntax in the sense above, often meant with emphasis on well formed sentences. Syntax as a theoretical discipline also studies how these rules function and are derived (e.g. syntax as a 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, morphemes etc. Some newer theories of grammar such as Nanosyntax also incorporate other domains within phonology as well into syntax, such as prosody and stress. However, traditionally they are not included within syntax.
What is included within syntax and what is not is a question whose answer has changed many times. Chomsky, in his groundbreaking work Syntactic Structures, describes syntax as the autonomous module: all other domains of grammar rely on the output of syntax to function. These domains are phonology, morphology, and semantics (Chomsky famously was incredibly against there being a morphology module, something he later changed his mind on).
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 July 29, 2026 at 12:34:50. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.