What is the relationship between syntax and semantics?

There are a number of positions you can take on what the relationship between syntax and semantics. You could think that syntax is prior and so think that an expression's syntactic function determines (or, weaker, constrains) the expression's semantic role. Or you could hold the converse (i.e., an expression's semantic role determines/constrains it's syntactic function). Finally, you could deny any significant connections exist and think that they are two largely orthogonal parts of language. Most people I talk to seem to agree that there is some relationship, but they're not sure what exactly it is. What views have linguists developed about the relationship between these two branches? What are some of the classic/canonical articles and what is the current state of the art?

My lazy attempt: Syntax and semantics both work at sentence level. Syntax has to do with the form and order of words within the sentence. Semantics has to do with the meaning. Syntax is language dependent, whereas the semantics remains the same if the same sentence were expressed in another language. (I hope the generalizations that I have made, and the short-cuts I have taken, are forgiveable.)

@prash I appreciate the overview, but I'm more interested in claims of dependence or independence. Can a word's syntactic and semantic functions vary independently? For instance, can something function syntactically like a singular term (perhaps cashing this out in terms of inferential role or something) while not behaving semantically like a singular term (perhaps its semantic function is more predicative than referential). Is this concern clear? Does this clarify the question at hand (enough to warrant an edit)?

5 Answers 5

I'll speak for the research tradition I work in, namely Construction Grammar. In CxG you have something called constructions which are symbolic units that directly link form and meaning. A construction can the be a word, say tree, but it also can be an idiom kick the bucket, or a semifixed construction [the mother of all X] or [what is X doing Y] (what is that fly doing in my soup?), or an argument structure construction (kinda hard to represent). Syntax then is intrinsically interrelated to semantics, and there is a really strong link between both.

There are many flavours of construction grammar, you have on the one hand some very formalist approaches like sign based CxG by Kay and Fillmore; and on the other hand some more cognitive takes on the matter like Langacker, Croft, Bybee or Goldberg. I like better this latter approaches, if you are interested you should check out Croft 2001 Radical Construction Grammar and Langackers Cognitive Grammar, also Goldberg has a very important book Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure.

Thanks much for the response. Is construction grammar compositional in the usual sense? I ask because it reminds me a bit (though only a bit, in the sense that they appear to have more of a holistic and top-down, rather than bottom-up, approach to language analysis) of inferential role semantics and a common criticism of that school of thought is that it is non-compositional, or at least not compositional in the classical sense.

It is partly compositional, but the construction adds meaning to the whole sentence, you can't derive the meaning of the sentence just from the words. More abstract constructions allow for more compositionality, while more specific ones allow for less. Idioms are an example of constructions that allow almost no compositionality in meaning.

Just throwing out Hilpert's (2014) Construction Grammar and its Application to English and Goldberg's (2019) most recent Explain Me This: Creativity, Competition, and the Partial Productivity of Constructions as other good (and probably easier to read) introductions to CxG!

It is not easy to describe the relation between syntax and semantics, but it is probably easy to say why that is not easy: there are different perspectives about syntax and semantics, so the relation depends on what you understand by form and meaning, structure and content. If you look at the history of Chomskyan linguistics, you will find the chapter in which a group of people were working on deep structures so much that they actually were doing semantics and not syntax. Moreover, anaphors and quantifiers became really problematic for the framework, so it became insufficient to explain the linguistc phenomena under discussion. But Chomsky and others were not happy about the division, and today there are many syntacticians who keep themselves away from the "dangerous" interface with semantics.

Now, to be more specific about your question, but still general about the definitions, I think that you could see syntax as independent from semantics but not the other way around. Let's say the goal of syntax is to develop theories about the similarities and differences between linguistic structures within and across languages. Let's also assume that we can study elements that are necessary for those structures to be well-formed, and that their meaning is not essential for the interpretation of the whole structure. Then it is possible to say that syntax does not need semantics, or that it is structure what determines meaning. Whether that is interesting or helpful is up to the syntacticians who work under such view. As for semantics, it simply cannot be studied without reference to syntax, for any meaningful phrase or sentence is always a that, a phrase or a sentence, so it must have a certain structure.

If we want to study language in a more comprehensive way, I think the relation bewteen syntax and semantics must be one of interdependence, and thus it is more fruitful to study the way structures are built up and also the meaning that arises from such building operation. Just as we have structure building from a syntactic perspective, we have function application from a semantic perspective. This is one of the several general descriptions of the relation between syntax and semantics, but again, the specific views depend on the theories of syntax and semantics which you are working with. Even if the view is that syntax and semantics are related in some way, there are approaches in which syntactic and semantic structures are generated independently, for instance 1 below. There's also an interesting and recent article about the syntax-semantic interface that you might find useful, and that's 2. Another interesting presentation of the mutual influence of syntax and semantics can be found in 3 (link to video).

1. Jackendoff (2002) Foundations of language: brain, meaning, grammar, evolution.
2. Hackl (2013) The syntax-semantics interface.
3. Conference by Barbara Partee (2009) video