On Monday, I talked about how the amplify feature of Accordance creates the proper search syntax for any Greek or Hebrew text you select. Today I want to focus on ways that you can modify what happens when you amplify.
Let's say I'm looking at the phrase kai egeneto, "it came to pass," in Matthew 7:28. I want to search for all occurrences of that phrase, so I select it and click the Search button on the Resource palette. Accordance immediately opens a new Search window, inserts the words I selected in the Search entry box, and then finds every occurrence of that phrase. Yet because Accordance defaults to searching by lexical form, it finds not just the specific inflected phrase kai egeneto but any form of kai (there's only one of course) followed by any form of ginomai (the lexical form of egeneto). For example, this search returns kai ginetai in Matthew 13:32, which speaks of the mustard seed becoming a tree. If I'm only interested in places where the text reads "and it came to pass," this lexical search is too broad.
Now, let's rewind back to where I selected the phrase kai egeneto and clicked the Search button. Just clicking the search button resulted in a search for lexical forms, but I can tell Accordance to search for the inflected forms I've selected simply by holding down the option key while I click the Search button.
When I option-click the Search button, Accordance opens a new Search window and encloses the search for kai egeneto in quotation marks—the symbol used to specify inflected forms. This search for the inflected phrase kai egeneto results in 31 fewer hits than the default lexical search.
In addition to searching for a selection by lexical and inflected forms, you can also search by root. To do this, simply hold down both the shift and option keys while clicking the search button on the Resource palette. Doing this for kai egeneto returns all the occurrences of kai ginomai, as well as phrases like kai genea, kai genealogia, etc.
By the way, if you forget which modifier keys do what, you can always right- or control-click to bring up a contextual menu, then choose one of the options in the Search For submenu.
# posted by David Lang @ 9:26 AM
