Parsing is a 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 so that the text can be understood. The term "parsing" comes from the Latin pars for "part (of speech)."
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.
Key Takeaways: Parsing
Parsing is the process of breaking down a sentence into its elements so that the sentence can be understood.
Traditional parsing is done by hand, sometimes using sentence diagrams. Parsing is also involved in more complex forms of analysis such as discourse analysis and psycholinguistics.
Parse Definition
In linguistics, to parse means to break down a sentence into its component parts so that the meaning of the sentence can be understood. Sometimes parsing is done with the help of tools such as sentence diagrams (visual representations of syntactical constructions). When parsing a sentence, the reader takes note of the sentence elements and their parts of speech (whether a word is a noun, verb, adjective, etc.). The reader also notices other elements such as the verb tense (present tense, past tense, future tense, etc.).