One of the chief objectives of syntactic analysis is a compact description of the structure of utterances in the given language. The paucity of explicit methods in this work has made syntactic analysis a tedious and often largely intuitive task, a collection of observations whose relevance is not certain and whose interrelation is not clear. Partly as a result of this, many grammars have to carried little or no syntactic description.
- Harris (1946), a pag.161