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How to search for Subject Substantival Participles


Marco V. Fabbri

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The name Participle suggests that they take part of the two different parts of speech: verb and adjective. As verbs, they have tense and voice; as adjectives, they have case and gender and number.

 

All adjectives, in Greek, can be substantivized if they are arthrous, provided that they are not adjunct to a Noun in the same phrase. If there is, then the article specifies the Noun, and the adjective is an adjunct to the Noun; We use to say that the adjective is attributive. The phrase ὁ πονηρὸς ἄνθρωπος means “the evil man”, as the adjective is adjunct to ἄνθρωπος.

The case is different in the Clause: ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ (Mat 6:13). This means “deliver us from the evil one" (if we take the Genitive as masculine) or “deliver us from evil” (if we take the Genitive as neuter), as there is no Substantive for the adjective to lean on. This is what interests us now.

 

In the GNT there are plenty of substantivized Participles. They can be Subject or Complement (Blass-Debrunner-Funk § 411). With the syntax module we can easily search for them.

 

In this post, we will search for Subject Sustantive Participles (Blass-Debrunner-Funk § 413):

 


  1.  
  2. Open a new Search Text, choose GNT-T as search text, and choose to search for Words (not Verses) within every Chapter or Book (not Verse, etc)
  3. Open a new Greek Construct (Command-2), that will be automatically linked to the Search Text
  4. In the Greek Construct window, drag the Phrase element and drop it into the first column
  5. When prompted, choose Subject Phrase, then click OK or press Return
  6. Drag the Article element and drop it into the first column of the SUBJECT PHRASE
  7. When prompted, choose Case: Nominative, then click OK or press Return
  8. Drag the Clause element and drop it into the second column of the SUBJECT PHRASE
  9. When prompted, choose Dependent and Subject, then click OK or press Return
  10. Drag the Verb element and drop it into the first column of the Subj. DEPENDENT Clause
  11. When prompted, choose Mood: participle and Case: Nominative
  12. We need to leave the box “Search both directions” unchecked, as the article must come before the participle that it specifies.
  13. Press Return, or click on the search button.

 

The results will look like this:

 

post-76-052023800 1320581389_thumb.png

 

If we examine the results, we notice one false hit in Matthew 1:23 μεθερμηνευόμενον. Apart from it, the other results are sound.

 

The false hit is due to the fact that there are many subordinates in the Sentence, and the search find a remote superordinate Subject Clause. However, we may easily remove any false hit in the same way that we used when searching for coonjunctive Participles.

 

The reason is the same: a participial Subject Clause always has the same Subject as its superordinate Clause. As a result, the subordinate Subject Clause never encloses a Null Subject. It will be enough to tell this to Accordance.

 

Let's modify the search:

 


  1.  
  2. Drag the element VERB participle nominative and drop it into the second column of the Subj. DEPENDENT
  3. Drag the element antecedent and drop it into the first column of the Subj. DEPENDENT
  4. Drag the element NOT and drop it over ANTECEDENT
  5. Press Return, or click on the search button.
     

 

The results will look like this:

 

post-76-064423800 1320582538_thumb.png

 

This time, the results are what we expected.

 

I hope this helps. If there are questions, they may be posted as replies to the topic.

Edited by Marco V. Fabbri
corrected typographical errors
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  • 6 years later...

Can this be done by typing in the search bar rather than having to build something using that visual interface approach?

 

Also, what is GNT-T? I have so many greek modules I don't know which one that is a code for.  

Edited by Ιακοβ
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Can this be done by typing in the search bar rather than having to build something using that visual interface approach?

 

Also, what is GNT-T? I have so many greek modules I don't know which one that is a code for.  

Which makes me wish the names of the texts modules were more easily recognized. Some of the names communicate very little info and one has to look at the module data to figure out which one it is.

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The Greek Syntax was designed for the GNT-T (our tagged text of the NA27) but has since been updated to work with GNT28-T.

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Hey Ιακοβ,

 

  You really cannot do these on the command line search. The individual syntax tags like ANTECENDENT, SUBJECT and so on can be used but you cannot express the structure of the phrases, clauses (and their properties) and the hierarchy.

 

  The module is also known as NA28 Greek NT these days in the library though you'll see GNT28-T as the short module name under it.

 

Thx

D

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I realize this is a very old thread (2011), but I like working with these kind of searches. So many things may have changed, but I only get a fraction (147 hits) of the ones that your search found. There is now a "Depth" parameter, but even playing around with that (and adding gerunds), I can't get correct results. Thanks.

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I'll take a look later but I would say that there have been changes in the database as well as the query code. I would start with looking at known examples and how they are modelled and rebuild the query from scratch. In some respects it's a little unfortunate you are getting so many hits as you are. It suggests at least two structural classes exist which might complicate getting all the hits. Also, I don't know if the entire db had been mapped at the time this was done originally so I don't know if you should in fact be looking for more hits.

 

Mark, can you post your construct or is it identical to Marco's second one above ? What depth are using ? I usually start with 0.

 

thx

D

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I followed the exact steps for creating the search in the initial post.

It appears the default Depth is 2, but I tried setting it to 0, 2, and infinity, and also Limit depth to clause boundaries.

I'm still trying to figure out the syntax stuff, so it may all be my lack of understanding!

Thanks for checking it out, Daniel (of MITHRIL status!)

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Yea, I followed those steps, it is quite difficult on a smaller sized laptop because everything doesn't really fit, and yes, I really don't quite understand what is going on visually.  But I'll work it out at some point I am sure  

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I think this may be a bug - I've opened another topic on it.

 

Are you both using the beta version of Acc ?

 

Thx

D

post-32023-0-74853100-1539999013_thumb.jpg

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Yes, I'm running the beta version.

I just tried running it in 12.2.9.

I get quite 672 hits including ones like Mat 1.20 (τὸ γὰρ ἐν αὐτῇ γεννηθὲν) which would be hard to find under most circumstances, but it misses τὸ ῥηθὲν in Mat 2.15 and 2.17. Odd...

 

So, something is odd both with the search and with how it works in the beta.

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Yes I saw that. I don't quite get the 2:15,17 issue but it's possible it's a little broken in 12.2.9 and much more so in the beta. We'll see what dev say when they've had a chance to look at it.

 

Thx

D

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It's especially interesting that 1:22 comes up as at hit but 2:15 and 17 don't when they are the exact same structure in the representation of the data (the graphs). I'd for sure agree there seems to be some form of a bug going on with 2:15 and 2:17.

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