What Does Parse Mean_
Words in English: Parsing Practice – Rice University
To parse a word means to analyze it into component morphemes. Recall
that morphemes are the smallest units in a language that link a form
with a meaning or function.
Parsing is generally done on complex words that came from Latin and
Greek. (We call such words “Latinate” vocabulary or “Classical”
vocabulary. ) Such words typically show the clearest word structure,
in part because Latin and Greek had many affixes for inflection and
for dervivation,
and (unlike in Germanic) their word structure REQUIRED putting together roots with affixes.
Further, many Classical words were
coined long after the classical period, so the word structure is more
transparent than words from English or French that have been in the
language so long that their morphological structure has become
murky. With many native and nativized words, what were once
separate morphemes have over a long period of time fused together.
For example, the native word stirrup comes from stig ‘climb’ +
rap ‘rope’. The word meant in Old English ‘loop of rope for
placing the foot to climb on a horse’. This word was a compound in Old English, with two separate
morphemes, but now it is a single, unanalyzable morpheme with the
modern meaning ‘device for holding the foot when mounting and riding a
horse. ‘ The whole word now has one morpheme instead of two, and it no
longer refers specifically to rope at all.
The following example words are for parsing practice. For each
morpheme in a word:
2. below it write the morpheme’s
meaning or function. (There may be some parts of the word that are
“linking forms” without any meaning. )
3.
To complete the parse, we state
the actual meaning of the whole word in Modern English. Note that this
meaning may be somewhat indirectly related to the component morphemes.
The ‘e’ in parentheses is only there for spelling reasons–it has no
etymological connection with the word for ‘create’ in Latin. It is
only a prompt to remind us that the morpheme /ate/ is pronounced with
a front mid vowel.
Sample words for parsing
One set of sample words comprises the phonetics terminology for our
class. For these words see Sound terminology.
apteryx hippopotamus megalith
perihelion bilabial eliminate
transliterate seminal iatrogenic
anhydrous biennial apnea
endoscopy supercilious aphelion
inculpate exophthalmic laryngoscope
anemia osculate subcutaneous
luminary amygdala polysemy
pandemic androgynous agenda
memorandum exculpate hippocampus
More sample words for parsing
confluence megalith incarnation
cryptogenic geminate phyllophagous
nyctitropism phototropic phytogenic
aphasia perigee oenophile
formicivorous apterous aliform
arachnophobia apiculture oology
galactic errant errand
Parsing vs. Etymology
Parsing is related to finding the etymology of a word, but it is a
little different because the focus is on word structure, rather than
word history. This has various consequences.
Word structure (for our purposes) includes primarily roots
and affixes. So, many of original bits of the source word, such as
inflectional morphology in the original language, are not relevant to a
parsing.
For example, for hippopotamus, you mind find in a dictionary
etymology that the word comes from Greek hippos ‘horse’
followed by Greek potamos ‘river’. The dictionary etymology
might also indicate that the -us ending comes from Latin (Latin
and Greek were fairly closely related languages, and the Greek noun
inflectional ending -os is historically/etymologically the same
as Latin -us. )
In a parse, we leave out the information about what language the
word parts come from: it is not relevant for this purpose.
Even more important, we also strip the source elements down to their
roots, removing inflectional endings from the original language
that the dictionary etymology included, if they do not survive in the
borrowed word.
The resulting parse:
hippopotamus
hipp + o + potam + us
‘horse’ linker ‘river’ ‘noun inflection’
‘large thick-skinned herbivorous mammal living in and around tropical waters
of Africa’.
For the definition, you have to get close enough to the modern meaning
for someone to understand the thing defined as something distinct from
similar things, but you do not need a very technically precise
definition. For our purposes ‘large African mammal living around
rivers and swamps’ would be good enough.
Important: Definitions
should preserve the part of speech of the word defined. So you would
not define somnambulant as ‘to sleep-walk’, but rather
‘sleep-walking’. It is an adjective, not a verb, so the definition
must be appropriate for an adjective.
As stated above, parsing is generally done on complex words that came
from the classical languages.
The aim in parsing is to find out the structure of the word,
isolating the meaningful elements that recur not only in this word but
in other words, so that
we can learn more of those elements and learn more words that use
them.
Etymology, on the other hand, is more like the story of a word from
the earliest point we can trace, to its modern meaning. Etymology can
be done on any word, because all words have SOME history. Even a novel
creation like googol ‘mathematical term for 10 to the 100th
power’ has an etymology: “Novel creation of amusing-sounding
word by young son of the mathematician who defined it”. But
it wouldn’t make too much sense to try to parse googol,
because it is a simplex word, i. e. it has only one morpheme in it.
In the hippopotamus example, the parse is different from the
etymology, not only because a parse does not include the source
language of loanwords as an etymology does, but also because some
dictionary etymologies break the word down into whole source
words instead of roots, e. g. an etymology might state: “from
L. hippopotamus, from Gr. hippos ‘horse’ +
potamos ‘river’ “. (Dictionary etymologies are heavily
abbreviated and you have to figure out the abbreviations for
the dictionary you use. ) The
-os part of both of the components of the compound was just a
Greek inflectional ending signalling a certain class of masculine noun
with nominative case. It’s not in the parse because it doesn’t show up
in the word today. The -us ending of hippopotamus, on
the other hand, DOES show up in the modern word so we must take
account of it. In fact it is the Latin version of the same Greek
inflectional ending seen in hipp-os. It is enough to just gloss
it as ‘noun inflection’. Later (Ch. 9) we will learn some of the
inflectional categories of Latin and Greek which have ended up in our
English words.
To find the elements relevant to parsing, look in our textbook in
Appendix 1, starting on page 221. These elements are the pure roots
and affixes, without additional morphology, such as inflectional
morphemes that allowed them to be used in whole words in Latin and Greek.
That is what we want to use in parsing: roots and affixes.
© Suzanne Kemmer
What is parsing in terms that a new programmer would understand?
What is parsing?
In computer science, parsing is the process of analysing text to determine if it belongs to a specific language or not (i. e. is syntactically valid for that language’s grammar). It is an informal name for the syntactic analysis process.
For example, suppose the language a^n b^n (which means same number of characters A followed by the same number of characters B). A parser for that language would accept AABB input and reject the AAAB input. That is what a parser does.
In addition, during this process a data structure could be created for further processing. In my previous example, it could, for instance, to store the AA and BB in two separate stacks.
Anything that happens after it, like giving meaning to AA or BB, or transform it in something else, is not parsing. Giving meaning to parts of an input sequence of tokens is called semantic analysis.
What isn’t parsing?
Parsing is not transform one thing into another. Transforming A into B, is, in essence, what a compiler does. Compiling takes several steps, parsing is only one of them.
Parsing is not extracting meaning from a text. That is semantic analysis, a step of the compiling process.
What is the simplest way to understand it?
I think the best way for understanding the parsing concept is to begin with the simpler concepts. The simplest one in language processing subject is the finite automaton. It is a formalism to parsing regular languages, such as regular expressions.
It is very simple, you have an input, a set of states and a set of transitions. Consider the following language built over the alphabet { A, B}, L = { w | w starts with ‘AA’ or ‘BB’ as substring}. The automaton below represents a possible parser for that language whose all valid words starts with ‘AA’ or ‘BB’.
A–>(q1)–A–>(qf)
/
(q0)
B–>(q2)–B–>(qf)
It is a very simple parser for that language. You start at (q0), the initial state, then you read a symbol from the input, if it is A then you move to (q1) state, otherwise (it is a B, remember the remember the alphabet is only A and B) you move to (q2) state and so on. If you reach (qf) state, then the input was accepted.
As it is visual, you only need a pencil and a piece of paper to explain what a parser is to anyone, including a child. I think the simplicity is what makes the automata the most suitable way to teaching language processing concepts, such as parsing.
Finally, being a Computer Science student, you will study such concepts in-deep at theoretical computer science classes such as Formal Languages and Theory of Computation.
What is Parse? – Definition from Techopedia
What Does Parse Mean?
To parse, in computer science, is where a string of commands – usually a program – is separated into more easily processed components, which are analyzed for correct syntax and then attached to tags that define each component. The computer can then process each program chunk and transform it into machine language.
Techopedia Explains Parse
To parse is to break up a sentence or group of words into separate components, including the definition of each part’s function or form. The technical definition implies the same concept.
Parsing is used in all high-level programming languages. Languages like C++ and Java are parsed by their respective compilers before being transformed into executable machine code. Scripting languages, like PHP and Perl, are parsed by a web server, allowing the correct HTML to be sent to a browser.
Frequently Asked Questions about what does parse mean_
What does parse words mean?
To parse a word means to analyze it into component morphemes. Recall that morphemes are the smallest units in a language that link a form with a meaning or function. Parsing is generally done on complex words that came from Latin and Greek.
What does parse text mean?
Parsing is the process of analyzing text made of a sequence of tokens to determine its grammatical structure with respect to a given (more or less) formal grammar. The parser then builds a data structure based on the tokens.May 29, 2010
What does parse mean coding?
To parse, in computer science, is where a string of commands – usually a program – is separated into more easily processed components, which are analyzed for correct syntax and then attached to tags that define each component.Mar 23, 2017
