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Encyclopedic overview
In linguistics, a syntagma is an elementary constituent segment within a text. Such a segment can be a phoneme, a word, a grammatical phrase, a sentence, or an event within a larger narrative structure, depending on the level of analysis. Syntagmatic analysis involves the study of relationships (rules of combination) among syntagmas.
At the lexical level, syntagmatic structure in a language is the combination of words according to the rules of syntax for that language. For example, English uses determiner + adjective + noun, e.g. the big house. Another language might use determiner + noun + adjective (Spanish la casa grande) and therefore have a different syntagmatic structure.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “syntagma” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.