A ricoblog reader emailed a question about syntax, asking about how he could think about "syntax" to help inform his study.
I'll be the first in line to say that I'm not an expert here. So please take the below with a grain of salt and realize that it's pretty basic and not intended to be a complete statement on the issue (or even perhaps linguistically correct).
That said, here's my best shot.
Syntax is deep and complex. The biggest (and quickest) help I think I can give is to look at the text under study using the following heirarchy:
Book
Section/Pericope
Paragraph
Sentence
Clause/Phrase
Word
Start from the top down. The area of "syntax" involves stuff at the "sentence" and "clause/phrase" level (and, to some degee, the "word" level through morphological relationships and "paragraph" level through clauses connected by conjunction).
The "section/pericope" and "paragraph" levels (and, to some degree, the "book" level) could be called "discourse" levels. We can talk about discourse later. Much later.
So, areas of syntax deal with how words form clauses/phrases and how those units form sentences.
An example can be seen in 1Ti 1.1:
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope, ...
The words are easily identifiable. You can pick out names, you can pick out some nouns, and you can start to put things together. Syntax starts to look into how these larger groups of words come together, and what they communicate as a whole. One might even gain a better idea by inserting newlines and tabs into the flow of the sentence to work through the first bit:
Paul,
an apostle
of Christ Jesus
So here, paying attention to syntactic relationships helps us see that "an apostle" further describes or modifies "Paul". Paul is the one who is an apostle. And "of Christ Jesus" further qualifies the apostleship that Paul holds. He is an apostle of Jesus Christ.
We do this innately when we read in English; it's our native language. With Greek, though, we end up looking at the text for cues (conjunctions, articles, word order, sentence flow) to help us put the puzzle together.
Or something like that, anyway. Basically, instead of seeing each word as a unit, move up the tree to clauses/phrases, and examine how those units interact. Don't just say, "oh, 'apostle' — I know what that word means". Look at the larger units and start to put it together, determining the meaning of the larger parts, and how these larger parts relate with each other.
You don't need to know Greek (or Hebrew) to do this, assuming you have a good translation in your native language (I like ESV, NASB is good for this stuff too). Don't worry about labels for all of these things (at least, when you start). You don't need to know if it is a subordinate clause or an adveribal phrase. You don't identify all of that stuff with your native language to understand it, do you?
Make it easy and start breaking things up based on the punctuation in the text you use. If you see further unpunctuated units (i.e. phrases like "of Jesus Christ" that act to modify words or other units), then break there too.
But have a method to your madness. When I've done this sort of thing on this blog (e.g. here and here) I don't really have a linguistic theory in mind, but I do know why I've inserted breaks and tabs where I do. You should too. If you have Gordon Fee's New Testament Exegesis, he discusses something similar (but much more defined) in his section on "Structural Analysis". Maybe you want to give that a look-see if you have access to the book (in print or electronic).
I've said far too much in an area I'm very interested in but still learning about. Hopefully it's been helpful, and I haven't made any statements that are too erroneous ... please feel free to offer corrections/clarifications in the comments (or via email). Thanks!