What is Syntax?

Syntax is the branch of linguistics that studies the rules for the formation of phrases and sentences in a language. It examines the ways in which words are combined to create grammatically correct and meaningful phrases and sentences.

It looks at the structure of sentences, the relationships between different words in a sentence, and how they are related to each other, such as subject-verb-object, and the different types of phrases and clauses used to form sentences. It also examines the rules for word order, agreement, and case, as well as the ways in which words are inflected to indicate tense, aspect, and mood.

Syntax also deals with the study of how sentences can be transformed by rules of grammar and how different sentences can have the same deep structure but different surface structure.

Syntax is a fundamental part of the study of language and is closely related to the fields of semantics, which deals with the meaning of words and sentences, and morphology, which deals with the structure of words. Together with phonology, morphology, and semantics, it forms the core of linguistic study.