Syntax

In Linguistics, syntax is "the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages". It assumes that:

• natural language sentences can be broken down into components (the so-called syntactic constituents);
• the resulting structure (i.e., the relations between syntactic constituents) is hierarchical (a tree-like structure) rather than a simple list; and
• the structure can be predicted by rules (i.e., the structure is regular), which consist the grammar of the language.

For instance, the sentence:

they killed the man

is more productively represented as (1) than (2)

		[they][ ][killed][ ][the][ ][man]
(1)		(2)