Quote:
Originally Posted by Quickquill
We didn't parse sentences in school, but I had a private tutor who believed in it. Personally, I hated it, and couldn't see the point, since I already knew how to construct a sentence in English.
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Well I'm not sure parsing sentences in school is really quite the same thing, to be fair to any linguists out there. Attempting to understand the structure of a language is not only a matter of describing any one sentence, but of ascertaining rules about the language that can produce any grammatical sentence native speakers could think of, and every one they couldn't.
Now that's not what I was doing, as I'm only a mere beginner where syntax is concerned, but I feel linguistics deserves much more respect as a scientific discipline than being compared to rote memorization of grammatical terms.
