The first type of answer is simple: for the same reason that they might want to know something about cosmology, or biology, or statistics, or history. If your question is "Why should intellectuals want to know anything about grammar?", there are two kinds of answer. If your question is "Why do people who study the history of English (or French, or Icelandic, or …) want large historical collections of parsed text?", I hope that the answer is obvious. [(myl) If your question is "Why are engineers at places like IBM and Google interested in having access to large collections of accurately-parsed sentences?", the answer is that they believe that technologies from web search to information extraction to machine translation can be improved by accurate parsers, and that the way to get accurate parsers is to apply machine-learning methods to large treebanks. It's Sunday morning and I'm only halfway through my tea, so maybe I'm being obtuse, but can you please clarify or amplify a bit? And I clicked the "here" links in the first para, but then saw cover pages, if you will, of info that I couldn't access. I was very curious to find out why there's such a need for diagrammed sentences, but your blog doesn't seem to address this issue.
So if we accept the premise that some fraction of educated people ought to learn "grammar", in some sense of that word, then some version of the treebank framework is the obvious candidate for the kind of grammar that they should learn. There are relatively good parsers - and better ones every year. there could perfectly well in principle be translations to and from Reed-Kellogg diagrams, if those were somewhat better formalized. There are translations back and forth with a number of alternative representational formats, including dependency grammar, tree-adjoining grammar, categorial grammar, etc. My point is that this framework is stable and descriptively well-established, and has become a widely-accepted basis for computational and historical work. And the now-available explanatory materials are certainly not suitable for use by high-school or even university students. Most of the substance of the analyses would have been familiar to Otto Jespersen, for example.
#Sentence diagramming app android update#
Update - I should make it clear that the advantage I'm claiming for the "treebank" style is NOT that its analyses are superior to the long list of alternatives, starting with Reed-Kellogg diagrams. The people who don't know, and should, are intellectually irresponsible in this as in many other ways. The people who know about this stuff have done a dreadful job of public relations. There's something deeply wrong here, and plenty of blame to go around.
So who is doing all the research, and writing all those thousands of scholarly, scientific and technical papers? Computational linguists and computer scientists. Excellent tutorial materials have been developed for training people to use this standard.Īnd yet, if you were to ask faculty members in English departments and Schools of Education, I'd be surprised if one person in a hundred has ever even heard of this analytic standard - and I doubt that one in ten thousand would actually know anything substantive about it. In particular, there's an alternative standard which has been around, with minor modifications and additions, for more than 20 years which has been applied on a large scale (millions of words) in published "treebanks" of languages as diverse as English, Greek, Chinese, and Arabic and which is increasingly used for engineering, scientific, and humanistic applications, as documented in thousands of publications. It's a shame and a scandal that no other mode of syntactic analysis has any grip on the popular imagination today. These results have engineering as well as scholarly and scientific applications.īut the Reed-Kellogg method of "diagramming" sentences has been intellectually obsolete for a hundred years. In fact, there are people whose (paid) job it is to "diagram" sentences - some examples of their output are here, here, here, here, and here.