(treated as sing. or pl) a branch of semiotics (study of signs and symbols in languages) dealing with the formal relations between signs in abstraction from what they signify
The philosophical background of ‘syntactics’ is what distinguishes it from syntax, which is the standard usage within linguistics. Most linguists think of syntax as the study of sentence structure, but some also use the term to include the analysis of word structure (otherwise known as morphology), and some extend it to larger stretches of language, such as conversational dialogues — Professor David Crystal