Editing Syntactic category (section)

{{Short description|Word classes, largely corresponding to traditional parts of speech}}
A '''syntactic category''' is a syntactic unit that theories of [[syntax]] assume.<ref>For the general reasoning behind syntactic categories, see Bach (1974:70-71) and Haegeman (1994:36).</ref> Word classes, largely corresponding to traditional [[parts of speech]] (e.g. noun, verb, preposition, etc.), are syntactic categories. In [[phrase structure grammar]]s, the ''phrasal categories'' (e.g. [[noun phrase]], [[verb phrase]], [[prepositional phrase]], etc.) are also syntactic categories. [[Dependency grammar]]s, however, do not acknowledge phrasal categories (at least not in the traditional sense).<ref name=":0">{{Cite book|last1=Luraghi|first1=Sylvia|title=Key Terms in Syntax and Syntactic theories.|last2=Parodi|first2=Claudi|publisher=Continuum International Publishing Group.|year=2008|pages=15–17}}</ref>

Word classes considered as syntactic categories may be called ''lexical categories'', as distinct from phrasal categories. The terminology is somewhat inconsistent between the theoretical models of different linguists.<ref name=":0" /> However, many grammars also draw a distinction between ''lexical categories'' (which tend to consist of [[content word]]s, or phrases [[head (linguistics)|headed]] by them) and ''functional categories'' (which tend to consist of [[function word]]s 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 category|grammatical categories]] (also known as grammatical [[feature (linguistics)|feature]]s), which are properties such as [[grammatical tense|tense]], [[grammatical gender|gender]], etc.