syntactic

syntactic — adjective

1. Relating to the rules that govern how words are arranged to form phrases and sen

1.形容詞B2
釋義

Relating to the rules that govern how words are arranged to form phrases and sentences in a language.

例句

Lisa struggled with the syntactic rules of English when writing her first academic essay.

collocation: syntactic rules

Although Chinese and English share some vocabulary, their syntactic patterns differ greatly.

collocation: syntactic patterns

同義詞
  • grammatical

    Broader in scope — includes morphology and overall correctness, not just word order

  • structural

    More general — can apply to any system (buildings, music, organisations), not just language

  • syntactical

    Rarer variant of 'syntactic'; identical in meaning but far less frequent in modern usage

文法句型

syntactic + noun (e.g. rules, structure, pattern)

用法筆記

This sense is most common in linguistics and language teaching. In everyday conversation, 'grammatical' is used more broadly to describe well-formed sentences; 'syntactic' refers specifically to word-order and sentence-level structure, not to spelling or meaning.

常見錯誤

❌The sentence has a syntactic error because the word is misspelled.
✅The sentence has a syntactic error because the word order is wrong.
💡Syntactic errors relate to arrangement, not spelling.
❌Syntactic' and 'syntactical' have different meanings.
✅Syntactic' and 'syntactical' are interchangeable; 'syntactic' is simply more common and preferred in academic writing.

2. Relating to the rules that control how instructions and statements are correctly

2.形容詞B2
釋義

Relating to the rules that control how instructions and statements are correctly formed in a computer programming language.

例句

The compiler reported a syntactic error in the third line of Caio's Python script.

collocation: syntactic error

Sahil fixed the syntactic mistakes in his JavaScript code before it would run.

collocation: syntactic mistake

同義詞
  • syntax-related

    More informal; often used as a compound adjective ('a syntax-related problem')

  • lexical

    Refers to the level of individual tokens/words in code, distinct from the sentence-level syntactic rules

文法句型

syntactic + noun (e.g. error, mistake, analysis)

用法筆記

In computing contexts, 'syntactic' is often used in the phrases 'syntactic error' and 'syntactic analysis'. A syntactic error (also called a 'syntax error') means the code breaks the programming language's formatting rules and cannot be compiled or interpreted.