How to Use syntactic in a Sentence

syntactic

adjective
  • On top of that sequence, there's a structure, a syntactic tree that includes noun phrases and verb phrases.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 14 Oct. 2021
  • Flipping their syntactic form does nothing to their semantic role.
    — The Economist, 24 May 2018
  • 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
  • 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
  • Most of their bulk comes from blocks of syntactic foam—a buoyant, crush-resistant material made of glass microspheres in epoxy resin—that are padded around the frame.
    — Susan Casey, Smithsonian Magazine, 9 Aug. 2023
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • The book is characterized by nostalgia mixed with surgical literary and syntactic analysis.
    — Heather Scott Partington, New York Times, 23 June 2017
  • The back half of the sub holds blocks of a buoyant material called syntactic foam, composed of hollow glass microspheres embedded in an epoxy matrix; the newest type of this material can stand up to the deepest sea pressures.
    — Eliza Strickland, IEEE Spectrum, 29 Feb. 2012
  • The o1 model correctly produced two different syntactic trees, one that corresponds to the first interpretation of the sentence and one that corresponds to the latter.
    — Steve Nadis, Quanta Magazine, 31 Oct. 2025
  • After hundreds of trial and error steps, just like with biological evolution, the system evolves the best meaning and their syntactic/grammatical translation.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 17 Mar. 2016
  • Most deep-ocean submersibles use spherical titanium hulls and are counterbalanced in water by syntactic foam, a buoyant material made up of millions of hollow glass balls, which is attached to the external frame.
    — Ben Taub, The New Yorker, 1 July 2023
  • Songbirds possess the spontaneous ability to discriminate syntactic rules.
    — Jennifer Barone, Discover Magazine, 6 Nov. 2011
  • 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
  • In the study, applicants whose answers scored higher on vocabulary richness and syntactic complexity were significantly more likely to receive offers.
    — Caroline Castrillon, Forbes.com, 22 May 2026
  • Russell showed off some of the vehicle's key features, including a buoyant main body made from syntactic foam, a high performance material designed to withstand enormous pressure while maintaining flotation at massive depths.
    — Jacob Wycoff, CBS News, 23 Apr. 2026
  • 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
  • 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
  • Commonly understood as a kind of optical binding agent, color consolidates the otherwise disjunctive syntactic elements of Caro’s sculpture into a unified whole.
    — Gordon Hughes, Artforum, 1 Mar. 2026
  • 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
  • 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

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'syntactic.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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