SYNGE 



5670 



SYRACUSE 



whole, or the whole for a part. It may be con- 

 sidered a form of metonymy. The expression 

 "a fleet of forty sails" contains an example of 

 synecdoche, sails being used for ships, or a part 

 for a whole. 



Related Subjects. For purposes of compari- 

 son the following articles in these volumes may 

 be consulted : 



Figure of Speech Metonymy 



Metaphor Simile 



SYNGE, sing, JOHN MILLINGTON (1871-1909), 

 an Irish dramatist, born at Rathfarnam, near 

 Dublin. He was graduated from Trinity Col- 

 lege, and later is said to have wandered over 

 Europe, a silent, poverty-stricken man in ill 

 health. During this period he picked up num- 

 berless stories and legends among the common 

 people which he afterwards depicted so faith- 

 fully in his plays, which he began producing in 

 1903. 



After the completion of Aran Islands, and 

 the production of several short poems, he be- 

 gan to write plays, the prevailing note of which 

 was sadness, whether they were comedies or 

 tragedies. His work has been produced with 

 success both in Europe and in America ; all the 

 completed dramas deal with Irish peasant life, 

 of which he gives fearless, melancholy, tragic 

 and humorous pictures. They include The 

 Playboy of the Western World, The Shadow of 

 the Glen, The Tinker's Wedding, Riders to the 

 Sea and The Well of the Saints. He was in 

 Dublin, working on Deirdre of the Sorrows, at 

 the time of his death. 



SYNTAX, sin'taks, a division of grammar 

 that treats of the orderly arrangement of words 

 to form sentences and the grammatical rela- 

 tions of words in the sentence. Syn is derived 

 from a Greek word meaning with or together, 

 and tax from a word meaning to arrange, and 

 these two words combined constitute a term 

 that signifies the drawing up of an army in 

 battle array. Syntax is thus an appropriate 

 term to describe the building up of sentences, 

 which may be described as the marshaling of 

 words to express thought. 



The relation that any word bears to the 

 other words in the sentence is known as its 

 syntax or construction, and when an expression 

 is used ungrammatically we say that such use 

 is an error in syntax. The use of a singular 

 verb with a plural subject, for instance, as 

 They was here, is an error in syntax. In the 

 study of grammar the student learns not only 

 how to put words together to make sentences, 

 but he learns how to take the sentences apart 



to break them up into the elements of which 

 they are composed. The first process is known 

 as synthesis, and the second as analysis. 



Related Subjects. The various phases of this 

 subject are discussed in detail in the articles 

 listed below. In the articles on the parts of 

 speech full directions are given for parsing, and 

 the special errors in syntax connected with each 

 part of speech are pointed out. See: 

 Adjective Inflection 



Adverb Interjection 



Analysis Mode 



Article Noun 



Case Parsing 



Comparison Participle 



Conjugation Person 



Conjunction Preposition 



Declension Pronoun 



Gender Punctuation 



Grammar, subhead Sentence 



Sentence-Building Tense 

 Infinitive Verb 



SYRACUSE, seer'akuse, a small munici- 

 pality of Sicily, occupying the site of one of the 

 most powerful cities of the ancient Grecian 

 world. Near the close of the eighth century 

 B. c. a band of colonists from Corinth made a 

 settlement on the small island of Ortygia, near 

 the Sicilian shore. The colony developed into 

 a rapidly-growing city that soon spread over to 

 the main island, which was connected with the 

 islet by a causeway. 



Ancient Syracuse had a long and eventful 

 history. In the fourth century B. c., under the 

 rule of Dionysius the Elder (which see), it be- 

 came a center of Greek art and culture, and 

 won renown because of a victorious war with 

 Carthage. In 212 B. c., however, the city was 

 captured by the Romans, whose fleet had been 

 set on fire by the burning glasses of the famous 

 mathematician Archimedes (which see) . There- 

 after the city gradually declined, being reduced 

 finally to its ancient limits. Ortygia, the pres- 

 ent site, is now a peninsula. 



Modern Syracuse is the capital of a province 

 of the same name, and has a population of 

 about 27,000. It is interesting chiefly because 

 of its ruins monuments of past glory. Some 

 Doric columns of antiquity may be seen in a 

 cathedral erected about the ruins of a temple. 

 The fountain of Arethusa, famed in legend, is 

 in the southern part of Syracuse. See ARE- 

 THUSA. 



SYRACUSE, N. Y., the county seat of Onon- 

 daga County, situated in the central part of 

 the state, at the junction of the Erie and Os- 

 wego canals (see NEW YORK STATE BARGE CA- 

 NAL), thirty-seven miles southeast of Oswego, 

 148 miles west of Albany, the state capital, and 



