Syntax

In linguistics, syntax (ˈsɪntæks ) 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), agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics). There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals. The word syntax comes from Ancient Greek roots: σύνταξις "coordination", which consists of σύν syn, "together", and τάξις táxis, "ordering". The field of syntax contains a number of various topics that a syntactic theory is often designed to handle. The relation between the topics is treated differently in different theories, and some of them may not be considered to be distinct but instead to be derived from one another (i.e. word order can be seen as the result of movement rules derived from grammatical relations). One basic description of a language's syntax is the sequence in which the subject (S), verb (V), and object (O) usually appear in sentences. Over 85% of languages usually place the subject first, either in the sequence SVO or the sequence SOV. The other possible sequences are VSO, VOS, OVS, and OSV, the last three of which are rare. 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. However, word order can also reflect the semantics or function of the ordered elements. Another description of a language considers the set of possible grammatical relations in a language or in general and how they behave in relation to one another in the morphosyntactic alignment of the language. The description of grammatical relations can also reflect transitivity, passivization, and head-dependent-marking or other agreement. Languages have different criteria for grammatical relations.