What is the difference between syntax and semantics?

Answer 1

Simply put, semantics is the study of meaning and syntax is the study of the rules that govern sentence creation.

In more detail;

Semantics studies the meanings of words and phrases and how these meanings are stored and represented both in the brain and formally. This includes the study of metaphors, categorization, time and space, and much more.

Syntax attempts to derive the rules by which phrases and sentences are put together to form grammatical utterances in a given language. There are a large number of different syntactic frameworks that all have different underlying beliefs and origins, but they all share the same core idea; human language is rule bound and we can describe those rules.