What is "syntactic category"

n. (grammar) a category of words having the same grammatical properties [syn: grammatical category]

A syntactic category is a type of syntactic unit that theories of syntax assume. Word classes, largely corresponding to traditional parts of speech (e.g. noun, verb, preposition, etc.), are syntactic categories. In phrase structure grammars, the phrasal categories (e.g. noun phrase, verb phrase, prepositional phrase, etc.) are also syntactic categories. Dependency grammars, however, do not acknowledge phrasal categories (at least not in the traditional sense).

Word classes considered as syntactic categories may be called lexical categories, as distinct from phrasal categories. The terminology here is by no means consistent, however. Many grammars also draw a distinction between lexical categories (which tend to consist of content words, or phrases headed by them) and functional categories (which tend to consist of function words or abstract functional elements, or phrases headed by them). The term lexical category therefore has two distinct meanings. Moreover, syntactic categories should not be confused with grammatical categories (also known as grammatical features), which are properties such as tense, gender, etc.