Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 March 2019
Communication essentially involves a language or a symbolism whether this be a spoken dialect, a morse code signal or a chain of musical sounds. When we are expressing ourselves in language and other signs, our words, phrases and utterances may be said to form a pattern—a pattern of relationships. Much of this patterning does not rest in the definition and choice of units alone, but in its whole syntax. Defined by Carnap (1929), syntactics aims at all the purely formal aspects of language; that is, anything concerning signs and their orderings, but having no reference to designate real or imagined.