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Krasnow Institute > Monday Seminars > Abstracts Parsing Sentences According to Rules about Thoughts Douglas E. Brash Parsing converts a sequence of words into a hierarchical structure that reveals who did what to whom. Without parsing, a sentence is just a list of words. The diagrammed sentence from grade-school grammar is one type of parse. Parsing is usually considered in terms of syntax: rules about nouns, adjectives, noun phrases, prepositional phrases, case, subject-verb agreement, and so forth. The end result is typically cast in terms of a canonical syntactic structure, the X-bar tree. Cognitive parsing instead focusses on the structure of the ideas being spoken about. It begins with the primitive distinction between entities (such as "squirrel" or "justice") and relations (such as "above" or "pushed"). We find that natural language behaves as if it employs a reading frame into which entity-words and relation-words are dropped in alternating succession. Natural language seems irregular because humans consistently skip over certain types of relations present in their thoughts, leaving them unsaid. By using the reading frame, the listener -- or a computer -- can restore the missing relations. The hierarchical structure characteristic of language can then be built using recursive algorithms. These algorithms originate from operations typical of concrete thinking -- thinking about entities -- rather than from syntax.
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