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).