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syntax

   Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Medical, Wikipedia, Hutchinson 0.06 sec.
syntax: see grammar grammar, description of the structure of a language, consisting of the sounds (see phonology ); the meaningful combinations of these sounds into words or parts of words, called morphemes; and the arrangement of the morphemes into phrases and sentences, called syntax.
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syntax

Arrangement of words in sentences, clauses, and phrases, and the study of the formation of sentences and the relationship of their component parts. In English, the main device for showing this relationship is word order; for example, “The boy loves his dog” follows standard subject-verb-object word order, and switching the order of such a sentence would change the meaning or make the sentence meaningless. Word order is much more flexible in languages such as Latin, in which word endings indicate the case of a noun or adjective; such inflections make it unnecessary to rely on word order to indicate a word's function in the sentence.


The rules governing the structure of a programming language. It specifies how words and symbols are put together to form statements and expressions. See statement, expression and syntax error.


syntax - The structure of strings in some language. A language's syntax is described by a grammar. For example, the syntax of a binary number could be expressed as

binary_number = bit [ binary_number ]

bit = "0" | "1"

meaning that a binary number is a bit optionally followed by a binary number and a bit is a literal zero or one digit.

The meaning of the language is given by its semantics.

See also abstract syntax, concrete syntax.

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Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and levelling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers.
But oh, mesdames, if you are not allowed to touch the heart sometimes in spite of syntax, and are not to be loved until you all know the difference between trimeter and tetrameter, may all Poetry go to the deuce, and every schoolmaster perish miserably!
Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don't know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning.
 
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