Searching for liquids

[Rod Decker]

Any way to search for all the liquid verbs in a corpus? i.e., those whose *stem* ends with λ μ ν or ρ? e.g., μενω or ἐγειρω. You can't just use an ending wildcard since that looks for either lexical forms or inflected forms.

 

I tried: [verb ] @*(λ,μ,ν,ρ)ω

 

Assuming that this might find any verb with a liquid followed by an omega (the lexical form entry always ends in omega), but Accord "burps" on that string, so there must be something more sophisticated. Or maybe more simple?

[David Lang]

Rod,

 

You're not too far off. The parenthesized letters need to follow a character wildcard, and you don't need the commas between them. Like this:

 

[verb ] @*?(λμνρ)ω

 

The asterisk represents any combination of characters before the liquid, while the question mark represents the liquid itself. The parentheses constrain the question mark so that it can only represent the characters included within the parentheses.

 

Hope this helps.

[Rod Decker]

Thanks. That does the trick--at least it generates a list that needs to be manually sifted since a lot of hits are not liquids, but at least it's do-able.