What is a syntactic category?

Definition

A syntactic category is a set of words and/or phrases in a language which share a significant number of common characteristics. The classification is based on similar structure and sameness of distribution (the structural relationships between these elements and other items in a larger grammatical structure), and not on meaning. In generative grammar, a syntactic category is symbolized by a node label in a constituent structure tree.

Also known as:

Syntactic class

Kinds

There are major and minor syntactic categories:

Major categories

All phrasal syntactic categories

Examples:
NP (noun phrase), VP (verb phrase), PP (prepositional phrase)
Word-level syntactic categories that serve as heads of phrasal syntactic categories

Examples:
noun, verb

See:
lexical category

Minor categories

Categories that do not project to a phrasal level

Example:
Yes-No question markers

Contrast
	Contrast syntactic category with the following:
	Grammatical category (person, number, tense, aspect, mood, gender, case, voice...) Grammatical class (transitive and intransitive verbs; count and mass nouns…) Grammatical relations (subject, direct object, indirect object…) Functional categories (agent, patient, instrument…; topic, comment…; definite NP)
	Note: The terms grammatical category and grammatical class have also been used as synonyms for ‘part of speech’.

Source
	Bickford and Daly 1996 F4, page 2

Context for this page:

Concept module: syntactic category
In overview module: Glossary (Linguistics): S
In modular book: Glossary of linguistic terms, by Eugene E. Loos (general editor), Susan Anderson (editor), Dwight H., Day, Jr. (editor), Paul C. Jordan (editor), and J. Douglas Wingate (editor)
In bookshelf: Linguistics

This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 5.0 published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 2003. [Ordering information.]

Page content last modified: 5 January 2004