syntax

In computer science, SYNTAX is a system used to generate lexical and syntactic analyzers (parsers) (both deterministic and non-deterministic) for all kinds of context-free grammars (CFGs) as well as some classes of contextual grammars. It has been developed at INRIA in France for several decades, mostly by Pierre Boullier, but has become free software since 2007 only. SYNTAX is distributed under the CeCILL license.

In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form well-formed larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns in this area of linguistics include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), agreement, cross-linguistic variation, and the relationship between structure and meaning (semantics). Diverse approaches, such as generative grammar and functional grammar, have been proposed as ways to model the human mental grammars that form and interpret sentences. In logic, syntax is the study of how strings of symbols form well-formed formulas in formal languages. ==Topics== The field of syntax has a number of topics that a syntactic theory is designed to explain. 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 (e.g., word order can be seen as the result of movement rules derived from grammatical relations). ===Sequencing of subject, verb, and object=== 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. Some languages have no dominant order for these three sentence elements. In most generative theories of syntax, these surface differences arise from a complex clausal phrase structure, and each order may be compatible with multiple derivations. Word order can also reflect the semantics or function of the ordered elements. ===Grammatical relations=== 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. For example, subjecthood criteria may have implications for how the subject is referred to from a relative clause or coreferential with an element in an infinite clause. ===Constituency=== Constituency is the feature of being a constituent and how words can work together to form a constituent (or phrase). Constituents are often moved as units, and the constituent can be the domain of agreement. Some languages allow discontinuous phrases in which words belonging to the same constituent are not immediately adjacent but are broken up by other constituents (tmesis). Constituents may be recursive, as they may consist of other constituents, potentially of the same type.

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