null highlighting

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Hi ya,

 

I am looking at constructions with Null subjects right now as part of investigation of the eis + acc standing in to S-PN. I know that this is documented behaviour but I'll describe it anyway and then ask about possibilities for changing it.

 

When I search for Null and Subject in the first column of a construct and restrict to Acts ch 4 (for simplicity in this example) as here :

 

[LINK Greek Construct] <AND> [RANGE Acts 4]

 

 

I get 4:11 highlighted as shown :

 

 

This is great - its very obvious where the syntax believes the missing word in the text should be.

 

Now if instead I try this as part of a larger search I see the following word being highlighted instead.

Here's the construct :

 

 

And the highlighted result :

 

 

I believe the second method of highlighting is much less clear. Its particularly problematic with a predicate phrase where a verbal participle follows an article and one needs to be on one's guard. Also the inconsistency in these two cases here make me wonder when its highlighted one and when another. The documentation documents the second case as the norm though I believe there is reference to the first case in at least one place also, I just can't recall where I read it.

 

Any chance that all such searches returning missing elements could be made to highlight in the first way rather than the second ?

 

Thx

D

 

 

 

 

[Λύχνις Δαν]

OK further examples indicate that this is not simply a case of very simple searches showing the missing word highlighted and more complex ones highlight the following word. But its unclear why its not always highlighting the missing word.

[Helen Brown]

You really need to narrow the search by adding a WITHIN between the subject and the phrase. This does allow the highlighting of the NULL subject. Otherwise with a Chapter scope, you are highlighting every predicate phrase after the NULL subject in the entire chapter. We are not sure why this fails to highlight the NULL subject, but you do need to narrow it with a WITHIN or limit the range to just the one verse.

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Hey Helen,

 

Thank you for the for the response. It took me a few experiments to appreciate more what's going on but your remark on WITHIN was helpful. It looks like that without a WITHIN only first null subjects in the chapter are highlighted directly. Running this query without range restriction brings up the interesting case of Matt 1:17 where you have a null subj followed by a predicate phrase followed by a null subj followed by a predicate phrase. Both null subjects are highlighted as in the first example above. Thereafter the missing subjects are highlighted on the following word, as can be seen in the highlighting of λεγοντoς in Matt 1:22. Even restricting the chapter to Matt 1 doesn't change this. But adding a WITHIN does.

 

So it appears that in the first verse hit in a chapter the missing element is directly indicated and the rest of the hits in the chapter the indication is by highlighting the following word. My guess is that the WITHIN command is causing a reset in the highlighting algorithm enabling it to highlight the missing word directly again. What's odd is it doesn't seem to matter much what the number in the WITHIN is. 5 is as a good as 100 as far as the type of highlighting is concerned.

 

Now in fairness I do not normally do a wide open search for Null but I was trying to understand how it worked. It seems a slight tweak to the highlighting algorithm might be helpful, if I'm understanding what I've seen correctly.

 

As always, thanx for the help.
D