Syntax

Pronunciation

IPA: /ËˆsÉªn.tÃ¦ks/

Origin

Ancient Greek ÏƒÏÎ½Ï„Î±Î¾Î¹Ï‚, from ÏƒÏÎ½ (sun, "together") + Ï„Î¬Î¾Î¹Ï‚ (taksis, "arrangement"), from Ï„Î¬ÏƒÏƒÏ‰ (tassÅ, "I arrange").

Full definition of syntax

Noun

syntax

(plural syntaxes)

A set of rules that govern how words are combined to form phrases and sentences.

1988, Andrew Radford, Transformational grammar: a first course Chapter 8 The incorporation of a rule of V MOVEMENT into our description of English Syntax turns out to have fundamental theoretical implications for our overall Theory of Grammar: it means that we are no longer able to posit that the syntactic structure of a sentence can be described in terms of a single Phrase-marker representing its S-structure. For, the postulation of a rule of V-

MOVEMENT means that we must recognise at least two different levels of structure in our Theory of Grammar â€” namely, a level of D-structure (formerly known as â€˜Deep StructureÊ¼) which serves as input to the rule, and a separate level of S-structure which is formed by application of the rule.

(computing, countable) The formal rules of formulating the statements of a computer language.
(linguistics) The study of the structure of phrases, sentences and language.

Usage notes

The joke plural syntices occasionally occurs in blogs (by false analogy with matrix etc.)