"Syntax" is the theory of the construction of sentences out of words. In linguistics, syntax is distinguished from morphology, or the theory of the construction of words out of minimal units of significance, only some of which are words. According to this division, it is a matter of morphology that the word solubility decomposes into "dissolve" + "able" + "ity"; but it is a matter of syntax to analyze the construction of the sentence, "That substance is able to dissolve."

Although syntax is a traditional grammatical topic, it was only with the rise of formal methods growing out of the study of mathematical logic that the subject attained sufficient explicitness to be studied in depth, in works by Zelig Harris (1957) and Noam Chomsky (1957). Since then a flourishing field has been created; for it was rapidly discovered that the syntax of human languages was far more complex than at first appeared...