***I'm not a linguist- there was simply no entry on "syntagma" on e2, and I needed to fill it out so my link from the iterability writeup would have somewhere to go. It'd be really cool if someone who has more experience in linguistics and whatnot would give a more full account of this.***
A syntagma is simply an element of syntax, which, in turn, is the formal aspect of a language. It is "its grammar, or the way its expressions may be put together to form sentences."1 Examples of syntagmas, then, can range from letters, to words, to punctuation marks.
In terms of the philosophy of language, the syntagma can take the role of the basic semantic unit. This holds true for Jacques Derrida's evaluation, in which the syntagma as basic unit of meaning can be moved around many different contexts and take on different semantic and pragmatic values.