Syntax

Syntax is the subfield of linguistics that studies how words combine into phrases and sentences and the rules that determine which combinations a language's speakers accept as grammatical. Panini's Ashtadhyayi, composed in the middle of the first millennium BCE, is one of the earliest known systematic treatments of the subject, describing Sanskrit sentence structure through a compact, ordered system of rules that modern linguists have compared to a generative grammar. In the twentieth century, Noam Chomsky's generative grammar made syntax the central object of linguistic theory, treating the rules that generate a sentence's structure as a window onto the human capacity for language itself.