Words alone do not make a sentence; arrangement matters. Syntax is the study of how words combine into phrases, clauses, and sentences and of the principles that govern those combinations.

Syntacticians describe word order, constituency, dependency, agreement, and long-distance relations such as question formation. Languages differ in basic order and in how freely constituents can move. Formal models aim to generate the well-formed sentences of a language.

Syntax interfaces with morphology, semantics, and prosody. Teaching sentence structure, designing parsers, and comparing typological patterns all rely on syntactic analysis. Everyday judgments of what sounds right reflect implicit syntactic knowledge.

• Study of sentence and phrase structure
• Covers order, constituency, and grammatical relations
• Varies systematically across languages
• Foundational for theory, typology, and parsing