Hi,
I’m interested in finding a comprehensive parsing handbook, if there is such as thing. I remember seeing a article a while back on the parsing of the language of the US Constitution. I remember looking up the individual terms and wondering why I had never heard some of the parsing terms before. There must be a comprehensive list somewhere. I believe it must be in book form, since I have no found any very comprehensive lists online. I look forward to your feedback.
davidmich
By “parsing” do you mean “interpretation”? Or are you literally referring to identifying parts of speech?
Identifying part of speech, a grammatical parsing.
What i’m really looking for is a grammarian’s academic handbook for grammatical parsing purposes. It would have to be very comprehensive.
davidmich
Thanks all. Very interesting. It would be nice, though, to find a handbook of parsing terminology for grammarians. Perhaps “A Grammar of Contemporary English by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. Longman Group” might be a start. By the way, Hasn’t sentence diagramming been discredited?
davidmich
Could be, but if sentence diagramming isn’t what you’re after then I have no idea what you mean by “parsing”
What I’m looking for is the grammatical terminology to dissect a sentence in a way academics do. The problem is that a lot of this “parsing” that I occasionally come across (Is “parsing” that the wrong word?) is quite academic and ordinary lists of grammar terms are inadequate. A while ago I was reading what to me was the parsing of some extracts of the US Constitution to determine the true meaning of some of the the Articles. I would like to find a handbook/book that contains all of the known grammatical terms that academics use.
davidmich
Parsing has a precise meaning in computer programming (where writing instructions has to be done according to very precise rules) but obviously that meaning doesn’t apply to the Constitution. In that broader context, parsing just generally means to break the text down into segments and analyze how they apply to each other. So it’s more an art than a science. Two different people might parse the test differently.
Probably the most common example of this is the Second Amendment, where people have been arguing for decades of the meaning of the test. Does the introductory clause mean that the right to own guns only extends to the limits necessary to enable people to form a militia? Or is there a general right to own guns? There are people on both sides of this debate who claim the text supports their view.
So while you can parse the Constitution, don’t think you’re going to find clear and provable meanings.
Different linguistic theories use different terminology, and can break up a sentence in different ways. The book we used at university was Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar but I don’t know how common this approach is in the U.S.
Thanks Weedy. That’s certainly a good start.
davidmich