How to Use syntactic in a Sentence

syntactic

adjective

• The syntactic construction of the expression has a clear intent, both confirming the death of one monarch and the rise of another.
  — Elise Taylor, Vogue, 8 Sep. 2022
• But from inside the books, the syntactic icing is so clearly a protective measure, a droll band-aid.
  — Rachel Syme, The New Republic, 17 May 2018
• There is a deep hunger that Sondheim satisfies, for intelligence and syntactic rigor in a form that in lesser hands comes across as pat and lazy.
  — Peter Marks, Washington Post, 15 Aug. 2022
• The first is functional shift, in which a word achieves an additional syntactic function: nouns becoming verbs, verbs becoming nouns, and the like.
  — John E. McIntyre, baltimoresun.com, 3 July 2017
• Flipping their syntactic form does nothing to their semantic role.
  — The Economist, 24 May 2018
• Her lines crackle with syntactic wit: Nouns and verbs can riot and tumble, or, when most keenly needed, be startlingly absent.
  — Margalit Fox, New York Times, 16 Jan. 2016
• Enjambment, when a syntactic unit overflows from one line to the next, is a bedrock poetic practice, one that endows poets with the capacity to make and remake meaning.
  — Adam Bradley, New York Times, 4 Mar. 2021
• Only years of practice, and perhaps a certain gift for syntactic complexity, can bring the practitioner to the highest level.
  — George Calhoun, Forbes, 10 May 2021
• An extra clause is a kind of deceit, a syntactic opportunity to hide the ball, contrary to the straight-shooting world of the TED talk, of counter-intuitive factoids delivered with Gladwellian regularity.
  — Kerry Howley, Vulture, 25 Dec. 2021
• Language, too, has a recursive structure in which a syntactic category such as a sentence can contain other sentence clauses that in turn can contain clauses themselves, and so on.
  — Quanta Magazine, 17 Apr. 2019
• Last Wednesday, with a pandemic spiking and the economy plummeting, Senator Charles Schumer finally lost his cool and dispensed with syntactic best practices in the name of urgency.
  — David Roth, The New Republic, 24 Mar. 2020
• One accepts it in this single case because this writer keeps a kind of terrifying command; the sentences jump ahead of even the most perceptive reader, with a syntactic thrust sufficiently forceful to overcome the aforementioned rules.
  — Kerry Howley, Vulture, 25 Dec. 2021
• Chomsky cannot see any possibility that his interlocutor might make a valid point or two, or that any non-Chomskyan idea in syntactic theory might prove defensible.
  — Geoffrey K. Pullum, National Review, 17 Feb. 2022
• Only in poetry is there so much flexibility and freedom to actually use those kind of pair words together that make intuitive sense but don’t make syntactic sense.
  — Tara Duggan, SFChronicle.com, 30 Mar. 2020
• Greenberg is a linguistics expert who teaches courses in Russian and whose interests include Russian and Slavic linguistics as well as syntactic theory.
  — Valerie Strauss, Washington Post, 18 Oct. 2017
• Most of its bulk consists of a highly specialized syntactic foam—made of tiny ceramic spheres suspended in polymer resin—the only material able to provide buoyancy while remaining uncrushable.
  — Susan Casey, Outside Online, 22 Oct. 2019
• The book is characterized by nostalgia mixed with surgical literary and syntactic analysis.
  — Heather Scott Partington, New York Times, 23 June 2017
• Their arguments were syntactic, based on where specific words and phrases could occur in grammatical sentences, and what would permit transformational operations to be simplified.
  — Geoffrey K. Pullum, National Review, 17 Feb. 2022

Last Updated: 24 Jul 2024