ABSTRACT
I’m going to be honest here; most students find this chapter difficult, and many say they can’t see the point of parsing. But how do you tell the difference between “Vlad killed Boris” and “Vlad was killed by Boris”? And when you hear “I saw the Pennines flying to Dundee,” why don’t you think, “Cor, those Pennines are overhead on their way to Dundee again.” And when you come across sentences such as “The cop shot the burglar the gun,” how do you know just who had a gun? These are details that give language its fantastic expressive power.
