We investigate a hierarchical combination approach to the unification problem in non-disjoint unions of equational theories. In this approach, the idea is to extend a base theory with some additional axioms given by rewrite rules in such way that the unification algorithm known for the base theory can be reused without loss of completeness. Additional techniques are required to solve a combined problem by reducing it to a problem in the base theory. In this paper we show that the hierarchical combination approach applies successfully to some classes of syntactic theories, such as shallow theories since the required unification algorithms needed for the combination algorithm can always be obtained. We also consider the matching problem in syntactic extensions of a base theory. Due to the more restricted nature of the matching problem, we obtain several improvements over the unification problem.