Roughly speaking, if phonetics/phonology is the study of the relation of words to their sounds, and semantics the relation of words to meaning, then syntax is the study of the relation of words to each other, which is what we usually think of as grammar. Classical Chinese is an isolating language, meaning that each graph stands alone at all times, in isolation, without affixes of any kind, and unmarked for case, number, gender, or tense. The third-person pronoun ta can be he, him, her, she, it; they, them. And so can the graph qi, 其. qu, 去, retains exactly that form for go, going, gone, and went. What follows is that most Chinese characters can serve equally as both nouns and verbs, and modifiers too (adjectives and adverbs); apart from context no graph has a unique grammatical function. Word order is supposedly fixed, being Subject-Verb-Object, but so-called nouns regularly default to verbs (e.g., “running is a strenuous exercise”). Style also made the topic subject of the sentence difficult to ascertain, as when the head noun or object was omitted whenever context made it even slightly clear who or what it was.