Syntax
|
|
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the rules, or "patterned relations", that govern the way the words in a sentence are arranged. Syntax originates from the Greek words συν (syn, meaning "together") and ταξις (taxis, meaning sequence/order). It concerns how different words (which, going back to Dionysios Thrax, are categorized as nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc.) are combined into clauses, which, in turn, are combined into sentences.
| Contents |
In semiotics
In the earliest framework of semiotics (established by C.W. Morris in his 1938 book Foundations of the Theory of Signs) the syntax is defined within the study of signs as the first of its three subfields, syntax, the study of the interrelation of the signs; the second being semantics, the study of the relation between the signs and the objects to which they apply; and the third being pragmatics, the relationship between the sign system and the user).
In transformational-generative grammar
In the framework of transformational-generative grammar (of which Government and Binding Theory and Minimalism are recent developments), the structure of a sentence is represented by phrase structure trees, otherwise known as phrase markers or tree diagrams. Such trees provide information about the sentences they represent by showing how, starting from an initial category S (or, for ID/LP grammar, Z), the various syntactic categories (e.g. noun phrase, verb phrase, etc.) are formed.
There are various theories as to how best to make grammars such that by systematic application of the rules, one can arrive at every phrase marker in a language (and hence every sentence in the language). The most common are Phrase structure grammars and ID/LP grammars, the latter having a slight explanatory advantage over the former.
In other grammars
Dependency grammar is a class of syntactic theories separate from generative grammar in which structure is determined by the relation between a word (a head) and its dependents. One difference from phrase structure grammar is that dependency grammar does not have phrasal categories. Algebraic syntax is a type of dependency grammar.
Tree-adjoining grammar is a grammar formalism which has been used as the basis for a number of syntactic theories. Head-driven phrase structure grammar is a phrase structure grammar which uses additional constraints to simplify the necessary rules. Together with Lexical functional grammar it is a lexicalist grammar. This means that the lexicon is hierarchycally structured and contains more information than in other approaches.
See also: Phrase, Phrase structure rules, x-bar syntax, Syntactic categories, Grammar, Algebraic syntax
In computer science
The usage of syntax in computer science has evolved from its related usage in linguistics, especially in the subfield of programming language design. The set of allowed reserved words and their parameters and the correct word order in the expression is called the syntax of the language. The ubiquitous syntax error generated by various programming languages results when the computer cannot find a valid interpretation according to its preprogrammed rules of syntax for the code it has been requested to run, frequently due to a typo.
In computer languages, syntax can be extremely rigid, as in the case of most assembler languages, or less rigid, as in languages that make use of "keyword" parameters that can be stated in any order.
The analysis of programming language syntax usually entails the transformation of a linear sequence of tokens (a token is akin to an individual word or punctuation mark in a natural language) into a hierarchical syntax tree (abstract syntax trees are one convenient form of syntax tree).
This process, called parsing, is in some respects analogous to syntactic analysis in linguistics; certain concepts, such as the Chomsky hierarchy and context-free grammars, are common to the study of syntax in both linguistics and computer science.
See also
ca:Sintaxi cy:Cystrawen da:Syntaks de:Syntax es:Sintaxis fr:Syntaxe io:Sintaxo id:Sintaksis ia:Syntaxe he:תחביר li:Syntaxis nl:Syntaxis ja:統語論 pl:Składnia pt:Sintaxe vi:Cú pháp câu lệnh uk:Синтаксис zh:句法學
Categories: Grammar | Semiotics | Syntax