What's the difference between syntax and grammar?

Question

From what I've read, both terms have to do with the rules of formation of sentences. I've seen grammar used in mathematical contexts, in computability theory, where it has a precise definition. But from what I've read about syntax, I cannot see the difference between the two terms. So, what's the difference? Or do they mean the same?

Crosspost at English.SE: What's the difference between grammar and syntax?

Answer 1

Grammar is a (occasionally the) set of rules for the organization of meaningful elements into sentences; their economy, in one sense of that word.

There are two basic varieties of grammar; all languages have some of both kinds, but, depending on the kind of language involved, there's a lot of variation in how much of each kind they have.

One part of grammar is called Morphology. It has to do with the internal economy of words. So a word like bookkeepers has four morphemes (book, keep, -er, -s) and is put together with morphology. English doesn't have nearly as much morphology as most European languages; Russian grammar, for instance, has much more morphology than syntax. Russian is a synthetic (inflected) language.

The other part is called Syntax. It has to do with the external economy of words, including word order, agreement; like the sentence For me to call her sister would be a bad idea and its syntactic transform It would be a bad idea for me to call her sister. That's syntax. English grammar is mostly syntax. English is an analytic (uninflected) language.

Answer 2

Syntax is the study of the internal structure of phrases and sentences, and the hierarchies, grammatical functions and relations between constituents.
From my proposed tag wiki for syntax:

The study of the internal structure of expressions, especially between words and phrases, and the principles and processes that determine it. This includes words order, but also the grammatical relations that hold between words, as well as structural ambiguity, binding, reference, and similar issues.
Common approaches are numerous phrase structure grammars (GPSG, HPSG, LFG, G&B, X-bar, Minimalism, ...) and, on the other hand, dependency grammars.

Questions that syntax attempts to answer include:

• "How can we describe the structure of a sentence, i.e., how can we meaningfully group words into constituents and describe the hierarchical relations that hold between these consituents?" This is very often done by the use of tree diagrams (commonly referred to as "syntax trees").
• "How can we explain the two readings in a sentence like I saw the man with the telescope (1) I saw the man by looking through a telescope vs. 2) I saw the man who had a telescope with him)?"
• "Why does the sentence Myself shaved me not work?" (It has something to do with reflexive binding.)
• "Why (in English) can we say [the man] who I saw [] yesterday but not [the man] who I believe [the rumours that [] is a murderer]?" (It has something to do with the complexity in the structure of noun phrases and what you can extract for the formation of relative clauses).
• "How comes that in the sentence Mary kissed him, him is in accusative case, but in the sentence He was kissed, where he is still the one affected by the kissing and not the actor, the pronoun receives nominative case?"

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Grammar is a very broad term that can roughly be described as

the implicit rules by which speakers intuitively judge which strings are well-formed in a given language.

This includes

• syntax: The structure of phrases and sentences - see above.
• morphology: The internal structure of words.
  Questions include:
  • "How can we sort out the word antidenationalization into a meaningful structure?"
  • "What went wrong with the word undeadable, while we can say undead and unbreakable?"
  • "Why do we find un-use-ful okay, but un-ful not?"
  • "How come that it is sing-er-s and not sing-s-er? What is the difference between how a so-called derivational moprpheme -er and an inflectional morpheme like -s work?"
• phonology: The structure of sounds.
  Questions include:
  • "Why is it that we say ships, but not fishs and buss, but fishes and busses?"
  • "How do we intuitively know, without ever having heard the word imby-bimby before, that it should be an imby-bimby and not a imby-bimby?" (It has something to do with vowels and consonants.)
  • "Why can a word like rgafmp not exist in English?" Yes, this is actually ungrammatical. Grammar means more than "It's we swam, not we swimmed".
• Sometimes, semantics, i.e. the study of meaning, is seen as a part of grammar:
  • "Why can we read the sentence Every child sings a song both as For every child it holds that it sings some song (not necessarily the same one) and There is (at least) one song which every child sings (this being one and the same song)?"
  • "Why can bow mean both to lean forward and a thing that you use with arrows to shoot?"
  • "In the sentence John seeks a book about Norway, how can we account for the two readings 1) John is looking for a specific book about Norway he has seen the other day vs. 2) John is looking for some book about Norway, but isn't sure that what he wants exists at all?"

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To summarize, syntax is basically a sub-discipline of grammar that deals with the structure of more complex expressions, while grammar is the cover-term for every aspect of the system of rules that tell our intuition which structures are well-formed and what they mean, including word-level (morphology) and sound-level (phonology), possibly also meaning-level.

Answer 3

English Grammar and Syntax defines the two as follows:

Grammar is a set of rules that set forth the correct standard of usage in a language. These rules dictate how we should say things correctly. For example, agreement between words in relation to other constructions in the sentence.

Syntax is the study of sentences and their structure, and the constructions within sentences. Syntax tells us what goes where in a sentence.

Answer 4

Grammar is the general term referring to the set of rules in a given language including syntax , morphology, while syntax studies sentence structures. This means that syntax is studied within grammar as a daughter of grammar but sister of morphology where syntax has nothing to share with internal structure of words but grammar have i.e in morphology. So,morphology studies words forming, syntax deals with such formed words by putting them in a correct position within a phrase, clause or/and a sentence under the umbrella of grammar.

Answer 5

Latin grammar consists of two main parts.

Part I describes the word classes and what forms these words can take, nouns, adjectives, verbs etc.

Part II describes what parts a sentence has (subject, predicate, objects, predicative complement, adverbials), how sentences are built and special constructions used in Latin sentences as accusative + infinitive or absolute ablative.

The Greek word syntax consists of syn- together and taxe from a verb meaning to set, to put, so the idea of syntax is how words are put together to form a sentence.

The Latin way to describe language is extremely systematic and accurate. As a pupil in the higher classes I was filled with awe about this systematic architecture of language description. Unfortunately I miss this systematic way in English grammars by native authors.

Answer 6

I think I answered a very similar question recently, but I haven't located it. Please excuse any repetition.

I use grammar as the counterpart to logicians' term morphology, which means an account of what sentences (well-formed formulas) are in a language. I'd use the term morphology for that, as logicians do, except linguists have preempted the term morphology to mean something different -- an account of word structure. I believe my use of the term grammar is completely in accord with McCawley's use, in The Syntactic Phenomena of English. (But McCawley thinks grammar, in that sense, is not useful and is not interesting. Whilst I, on the other hand, am a grammar lover.)

I use syntax to mean the same thing that logicians, and McCawley use it for. It's an account of the relationships of sentences to other sentences, excluding truth and reference (which is semantics). I suppose there could be other relations of significance, but really that boils down to an account of logical implication based on the forms of sentences, which is called logical syntax (to distinguish it from logical semantics). I think it is fair to say that McCawley's interest is in logical syntax.

In these senses, syntax presupposes grammar, because until you know what the sentences are, how can you study implicational relations among them?

I think the use in linguistics of these two terms grammar and syntax, though, has been all over the map.