In linguistics, syntax (/ˈsɪntæks/ SIN-taks)[1][2] is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences.
Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency),[3] agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics).
In Hellenistic Greek, this also specifically developed a use referring to the grammatical order of words, with a slightly altered spelling: συντάσσειν.
In most generative theories of syntax, the surface differences arise from a more complex clausal phrase structure, and each order may be compatible with multiple derivations.
It became apparent that there was no such thing as the most natural way to express a thought and so logic could no longer be relied upon as a basis for studying the structure of language.
(For a detailed and critical survey of the history of syntax in the last two centuries, see the monumental work by Giorgio Graffi (2001).
Much of such work has been done within the framework of generative grammar, which holds that syntax depends on a genetic endowment common to the human species.
The most-widely held approach is the performance–grammar correspondence hypothesis by John A. Hawkins, who suggests that language is a non-innate adaptation to innate cognitive mechanisms.
Cross-linguistic tendencies are considered as being based on language users' preference for grammars that are organized efficiently and on their avoidance of word orderings that cause processing difficulty.
[15] More recently, it is suggested that the left- versus right-branching patterns are cross-linguistically related only to the place of role-marking connectives (adpositions and subordinators), which links the phenomena with the semantic mapping of sentences.
Generative theories of syntax typically propose analyses of grammatical patterns using formal tools such as phrase structure grammars augmented with additional operations such as syntactic movement.
In doing so, they seek to identify innate domain-specific principles of linguistic cognition, in line with the wider goals of the generative enterprise.
Generative syntax was proposed in the late 1950s by Noam Chomsky, building on earlier work by Zellig Harris, Louis Hjelmslev, and others.