Definition:
A grammatical exercise that involves breaking down a text into its component parts of speech with an explanation of the form, function, and syntactical relationship of each part.
Etymology:
From the Latin, "part (of speech)"Examples and Observations:
- "parsing 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) - "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 University Press, 1985)
