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Finding Definite Direct Objects without את


jkdoyle

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How (if possible) would I do a search for occurrences of the definite direct objects where the object marker את does not occur?

 

Any help or info appeciated.

 

Thanks

Jimmy Doyle

 

 

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It's not possible to search for objects in the Hebrew text per se - the closest thing is the complement tag. There is actually a Construct example in the help file "getting started with Syntax" on how to find objects without את, but it's now obsolete due to recent changes in programming, so following the example will not work, nor was it 100% accurate when it did work.

 

With kind regards

 

Peter Christensen

Edited by Pchris
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To put it bluntly: no. Well, not for the time being that is. I read in another thread that the syntax database is getting upgraded sometime this fall, so we'll just have to be patient until then.

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  • 2 months later...

I'm not at my home computer, so I have not been able to try it out yet, but do we know if the just-released updates to the syntax module have allowed better results for this search?

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This Construct Search isn't perfect, but will reduce the number of verses you have to filter.

 

post-29215-0-80351300-1447952521_thumb.png

Edited by Timothy Jenney
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Here are two mores searches to work with.

 

In these searches, I eliminate a preceding preposition (since prepositions also take complements) and nouns (to account for any cases of a bound phrase in a complement in which the 2nd item has ה). The first search looks for complement nouns that have the article but are not immediately preceded by את. If you want to look for nouns that have a  clitic pronoun, and thus also definite complements (e.g., מלאכתו in Gen 2:2), you would use the second search attached below. 

 

What these searches don't eliminate is the null copula ("verbless") clause. But since the complement may follow an verbal adjunct, I didn't want to specify that a verb immediately preceded the complement. That would miss relevant hits. And, of course, there are some hits that are neither relevant nor the null copula type. There are enough vagaries in Hebrew grammar to make constructing a perfect search for this particular phenomenon nearly impossible. 

 

#1 (nouns with the article):

post-29948-0-00426900-1448027129_thumb.png

 

#2 (noun with a clitic pronoun):

post-29948-0-14703300-1448027154_thumb.png

Edited by Robert Holmstedt
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Ooooo...

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Is that a good "Oooo", as in "I get it, pretty useful"? Or bad "Ooooo", as in "oh no, that's way too difficult and not very useful"?

 

By the way, I will state for the record that this specific search (def direct object w/o את) came up very early on in the project and it soon became clear to all of us that there would not be a way to construct a simple search without simply programming an ad hoc search tag for this, which is highly undesirable in the larger scheme.

Edited by Robert Holmstedt
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Hi,

 

These searches are definitely more objective. :)

 

Great stuff for an updated Guide/Manual.  :)

 

Regards,

 

Michel

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Robert, that was a good "Oooo...."

 

Not having been taught this syntactical system as a student, I am always eager to learn how to use it better for good searches.

 

Thanks!

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Hi Timothy,

 

I hope you know I was joking when I said Robert's searches were definitely more objective; I was just making a pun on the OP title, Finding Definite Direct Objects without את.

 

Regards,

 

Michel

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Being a good nerd, I caught it. Don't worry, Tim's got a good sense of nerd humour.

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Peter's earlier comment about the getting started with syntax doc had me thinking about all that's changed. So I toyed with 11.1.1 to find the equivalent search. The two versions (noun + article and noun + clitic pronoun) are attached below. The former gives 256 hits in the current database and the latter gives 1521. 

 

They are both more accurate that the previous searches. In fact, I would now ditch my older ones -- my problem was that I forgot about the INTER box.

 

And in these, you could add a lexical item to the predicate box to search for specific verbs!

 

Complement (Article+Noun, no את)

post-29948-0-18111600-1448063917_thumb.png

 

Complement (Noun+Clitic Pronoun, no את)

post-29948-0-85669600-1448063984_thumb.png

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Hi Robert,

 

I tweaked one of your searches to find definite construct chain objects.

 

post-32543-0-22648000-1448081439_thumb.png

 

I see that you’ve tagged these chains as Complement followed by Adjunct.

 

post-32543-0-41732200-1448081466_thumb.png

 

Do you think these are definite direct objects?

 

Regards,

 

Michel

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Michel,

They are definite, by virtue of the definiteness inherited from their clitic hosts. And they are nominal complements of a verb, so yes. Good tweak.

 

-- edit: to clarify, we tag all clitic hosts (i.e., nomen rectum) as the adjunct of a noun. That is not necessarily true for the clitic hosts of a bound participle -- if the valency of the participle suggests that the noun its bound to is the complement, we tag it as such.

Robert

Edited by Robert Holmstedt
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Update: I'm still playing with the searches and it seems that only my original "dirty" searches produce examples where the definite noun complement w/o את following another verbal argument (i.e., the complement is not right after the verb), as in Gen 14:21 תֶּן־לִי הַנֶּפֶשׁ). When I inserted an adjunct between the verb and the complement in the newer searches, they did not produce Gen 14:21. So, for now, multiple searches are needed.

 

Yay for Hebrew grammatical complexity!  :wacko:

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Robert,

 

Thanks for the clarifications.

 

Since the grammar is so complex, I think multiple searches are inevitable. We often begin with a search, but change the parameters, e.g., INTER, WITHIN, Depth, to cast a larger net. Then we revamp the search and repeat. If you agree that this is the case, I would like to suggest new features for the hits list: a check box beside each verse for selecting hits; an option for Acc to exclude unchecked hits on the next pass; and, the checked verse list stays checked on each pass, so new hits are highlighted by being unchecked.

 

I'm also sure that some Users would like to select popular searches from a menu, e.g., you write the searches, they fill in Lexical items, etc. I'm torn on this. Sometimes speed and simplicity is good. But, they would miss out on the greater learning experience, which is more important in the end.

 

It is a wonderful tool.

 

Regards,

 

Michel

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This topic is obviously of interest to me, so I sat down with Joel at SBL to see if ACC11 can finally handle these types of searches. We came up with the following search to look for unmarked complements by taking advantage of the new DEPTH setting and the redefined PLACE command.

 

post-30164-0-76344200-1448722630_thumb.png

 

This looks for all unmarked complements (defined as no את and no prepositional marking) for verbs other than היה. The key is to set DEPTH to 0 for searching within the complement phrase and specify that you do NOT want את or PREP specifically in PLACE 1 of the complement phrase.

 

You would have to add criteria or do a sub-search to filter the results based on definiteness. NB: there are some tricky cases you will have to think about such as כל and אשר phrases.

 

You will also want to think about your definition of direct object as it may not always overlap with the DB definition of complement. I am thinking in particular of certain double object constructions and some tricky quasi-transitive verbs.

 

Pete

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