Parsing

[David Dowty]

For the introduction to an anthology of papers published in 1985,
Arnold Zwicky wrote a short (10-page) survey of the history of the
concept of parsing -- as its has been understood in traditional
grammar, in formal linguistics (structuralist vs. generative), in
formal language theory, in computer languages, in Artificial
Intelligence (with respect to natural language parsing), and in
psycholinguistics.  Strictly speaking, this little essay is not an
exercise in lexicography but in the development of a concept in the
history of linguistics: Zwicky is as interested in the underlying
conceptions of language and grammar that these different senses of
`parsing' reflect as he is in parsing itself. Still, I would
definitely recommend it to anyone who is seriously interested in the
variation in word meaning across disciplines.

       "Introduction", by A. Zwicky and L. Karttunen, pp. 1-10. In:

       Natural Language Parsing: Psychological, Computational, and
       Theoretical Perspectives.  Ed. Dowty, Karttunen and Zwicky,
       Cambridge University Press, 1985.


David Dowty