Syntactic analysis of natural languages is considered to be one of the basic steps to advanced natural language processing, such as logical analysis or information retrieval with natural language texts. The Czech language can be characterized as a morphologically rich language with a relatively free word order, which further complicates the problem of syntactic analysis. Current parsing systems for Czech fight many problems including low precision or high ambiguity of the parser output. In this paper, we show a new approach to syntactic analysis of free-word-order languages based on the idea of pattern matching linking rules. The system, named SET, is currently developed and tested with the Czech language as a representative of free-word-order languages with very rich morphological system. We briefly mention current approaches and parsing systems for Czech. Then we describe the basic ideas as well as details of SET’s prototype implementation of the pattern matching approach to syntactic analysis.