We can all speak and understand each other; do we need to investigate how?

Introduction

Syntax is the part of grammar which deals with sentences and combinability of words. The core of syntax is the study of the sentence. Syntax embraces on the one hand the structure of the sentence, that is, its components, their structure and the relations between these components, and on the other hand structural and communicative types of sentences.

Syntax is all about the structure of sentences, and what determines which words go where. Studying syntax allows us to define descriptive rules about how language works. This part of grammar looks at the rules of a language, particularly how the various parts of sentences go together. While similar to morphology, which looks at how the smallest meaningful linguistic units, called morphemes, are formed into complete words, syntax examines how fully formed words fit together to create complete and understandable sentences. Understanding a language's syntax is important for understanding what makes a sentence grammatically correct.


We can all speak and understand each other; do we need to investigate how?


Studying syntax is relevant to a lot of subject areas in linguistics.
Aim: We must study syntax to understand how children acquire their language, how they start constructing sentences and what stage do they learn the tacit syntactic rules of the language. It’s also good to study syntax so we can understand how bilingual and multilingual speakers are able to construct their sentences despite having different structures for different languages. The sentence structure isn’t the same in English as it is in Japanese!

The Purpose of Syntax

Linguists and grammarians who study syntax are not necessarily prescriptivist, which means they do not attempt to tell people how to "correctly" form a sentence. Rather, they are descriptivist, in that they look at how people actually speak and then create rules that describe what a language community considers grammatical or non-grammatical. Syntax deals with a number of elements, all of which help to facilitate being understood through language. Without rules, there would be no foundation from which to discern meaning from a bunch of words strung together; whereas these rules allow for a virtually infinite number of sentences.