Definition:
(1) A traditional grammatical exercise that involves breaking down a text into its component parts of speech with an explanation of the form, function, and syntactic relationship of each part.
(2) In contemporary linguistics, parsing usually refers to the computer-aided syntactic analysis of language. Computer programs that automatically add parsing tags to a text are called parsers.
See also:
- Corpus Linguistics
- Garden-Path Sentence
- Minimal Attachment Principle
- Sentence Diagramming
- Traditional Grammar
Etymology:
From the Latin, "part (of speech)"Examples and Observations:
- "[Parsing is the] lost art of identifying all the components of a text, and once one of the fundamental exercises that tested and informed pupils in English. To parse a phrase such as 'man bites dog' involves noting that the singular noun 'man' is the subject of the sentence, the verb 'bites' is the third person singular of the present tense of the verb to bite, and the singular noun 'dog' is the object of the sentence."
(Ned Halley, Dictionary of Modern English Grammar. Wordsworth, 2005) - "Put simply, parsing requires the student to break down a sentence into its component words, classifying each in terms of its part of speech, as well as its tense, number and function in the sentence.
"Let’s say a teacher assigns a student the sentence 'Virtue secures happiness'--a likely specimen in 1847. The youth stands up, spouts something like, 'Virtue is a singular noun and the subject of the sentence; secures is a regular verb, indicative mode, active voice, present tense, third person singular; happiness is a singular noun, object of the sentence,' and sits back down with a sigh of relief.
"Parsing was almost insufferably tedious. It was also very difficult. And both these deficiencies were intensified by the way grammar was taught. Typically, students were first made to memorize definitions and rules, and only when they could recite them accurately by rote were they expected to apply them to sentences."
(Kitty Burns Florey, "A Picture of Language." The New York Times, March 26, 2012) - "Like so many aspects of modern intellectual frameworks, the idea of Parsing has its roots in the Classical tradition; (grammatical) analysis is the Greek-derived term, parsing (from pars orationis 'part of speech') the Latin-derived one. . . .
"Parsing, in the traditional sense, is what happens when a student takes the words of a Latin sentence one by one, assigns each to a part of speech, specifies its grammatical categories, and lists the grammatical relations between words (identifying subject and various types of object for a verb, specifying the word with which some other word agrees, and so on). . . .
"[M]uch of the history of parsing until a few decades ago can be understood as the direct consequence of the history of (partial) theories of grammar. Changes in the list of parts of speech, in the list of grammatical categories, or in the list of grammatical relations carry with them changes in what has to be said in parsing a sentence."
(David R. Dowty, Lauri Karttunen, and Arnold M. Zwicky, Natural Language Parsing: Psychological, Computational, and Theoretical Perspectives. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985) - Full Parsing and Skeleton Parsing in Corpus Linguistics
"The majority of parsing schemes have in common the fact that they are based on a form of context-free phrase structure grammar. Within this broad framework of context-free phrase structure grammar, an important distinction which is made is between full parsing and skeleton parsing. Full parsing on the one hand aims to provide as detailed as possible an analysis of the sentence structure. Skeleton parsing on the other hand is, as its name suggests, a less detailed approach which tends to use a less finely distinguished set of syntactic constituent types and ignores, for example, the internal structure of certain constituent types."
(Tony McEnery and Andrew Wilson, Corpus Linguistics: An Introduction, 2nd ed. Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2001) - Parsing in Computer Languages
"The notion of parsing in formal linguistics and formal language theory closely resembles notions developed in several other contexts. Consider, as a first example, the task confronting the designer of a computer 'language.' If an actual machine is to do anything with the strings of symbols that serve as its input, it must group them into particular types of 'words' and 'phrases' that can then serve as signals for specific alterations in the machine's internal states. This is a task quite analogous to the grouping of phonemes or letters into words and phrases, and the assignment of these units to categories, in a linguistic analysis--except that the designer of a computer language is free to stipulate the principles of grouping and interpretation (in particular, the designer is free to legislate that all 'sentences' and 'discourses' are unambiguous in structure and interpretation), whereas the linguist is obliged to discover the principles that happen in the (natural) language in question."
(Lauri Karttunen and Arnold M. Zwicky, "Introduction." Natural Language Parsing: Psychological, Computational, and Theoretical Perspectives. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985)
