Max M. answered • 03/14/19
Harvard Literature major with 20 years of coaching writers
Syntax is basically a fancy word for sentence structure, or the branch of linguistics that studies sentence structure.
For example, we use different syntax to turn a statement into a question.
- You are nice. -- subject then verb
- Are you nice? -- verb then subject
That's a simple example, and it can very quickly get more complicated, but by itself syntax just means the way the words are organized to form a sentence. It's a general term for one part of language, like cardiology is a term for one part of medicine, not a specific thing you use, like metaphor or bypass surgery.
That said, writers can use their understanding of syntax for literary effect.
Another simple example:
To elaborate on my example above, with many verbs nowadays, we turn statements into questions by adding an auxiliary verb and putting that before the subject:
- You know the answer.
- Do you know the answer?
But in Shakespeare's time, they didn't do that, and only flipped the subject and verb:
- You know the answer.
- Know you the answer?
So, if a writer today wanted to make a character sound Shakespearean, they might use the more old-fashioned syntax. So in that sense, you can use different kinds of syntax as a literary device, but syntax itself is a field of study.
