  The syntactic monoid of a language is generalized to the level of a symmetric
monoidal closed category D. This allows for a uniform treatment of several
notions of syntactic algebras known in the literature, including the syntactic
monoids of Rabin and Scott (D = sets), the syntactic semirings of Polak (D =
semilattices), and the syntactic associative algebras of Reutenauer (D = vector
spaces). Assuming that D is an entropic variety of algebras, we prove that the
syntactic D-monoid of a language L can be constructed as a quotient of a free
D-monoid modulo the syntactic congruence of L, and that it is isomorphic to the
transition D-monoid of the minimal automaton for L in D. Furthermore, in case
the variety D is locally finite, we characterize the regular languages as
precisely the languages with finite syntactic D-monoids.
