Syntax and grammar

For many people, syntax – in their everyday use of the term – is synonymous with grammar, and equated with a prescriptive set of ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ for correct usage. They may even identify ‘grammar’ with a book such as Fowler’s English Usage, which they consult periodically to be reminded that a preposition is something that they shouldn’t end a sentence with. (And, of course, to not split infinitives.) Grammar in this prescriptive sense is of only peripheral interest to linguists: our principal focus is on grammar in the sense of a scientific description of the structures of a given language, which shows how to produce all its well-formed sentences and no ill-formed ones.

Prescriptions about correct grammar are arbitrary and unsystematic in nature, they affect only a small set of constructions, and they generally do not correspond well with native speakers’ actual usage (which is why they make it into works like Fowler’s English Usage in the first place). A more technical use of the term grammar refers to the stored linguistic knowledge in the brain of an individual, which enables him/her to produce well-formed (i.e. grammatical) sentences in his/her mother tongue – though not necessarily in a standard or prestige variety. This is what Chomsky refers to as competence. For linguists, syntax means the study of the set of rules governing the way that morphemes, words, clauses and phrases are used to form sentences in any given language.

However, the distinction between ‘word-level’ and ‘sentence-level’ grammar is far from watertight, and there is a considerable grey area between the two. Linguists sometimes refer to morphosyntax when describing phenomena which straddle both levels: grammatical gender, for example, often manifests itself at word level in inflection, but may also affect relations between items within a sentence in the case of the syntactic phenomenon of agreement (or concord).