How to do a syntax search.

Hello everyone,

Part of my ThM thesis is an exegesis of Ps 75. The text is pretty difficult to interpret.

In verse 2 (BHS), the last clause reads something like "they recount your wonders." The clause does not have a definite subject. The subject is in the conjugation of the verb "saphar" (3rd person, plural). When translating from Hebrew to English it is possible to supply the translation with something like "men" or "people." So, we could use here "people recount your wonders." But I want to verify if this is really possible, or common in the BHS. So, I want to find in the BHS other occurrences of this kind of clause. I mean:

(1) I want to find clauses where there is no subject,(2) but there is a finite verb and a direct object;
Additionally, a clause where the subject is in the previous clause would be a false result to my search. This is because in Ps 75:2, the previous clause has a 2nd, m, sg subject (your name). Therefore it cannot be the subject of the following clause.

So, I want to find out if the BHS really has a clause where there is not an explicit subject.

I thank you in advance for any help.
Blessings,

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Comments

Graham Criddle

Hi Nielsen

The search below seems to get close to what you are looking for (at least your first condition).

(I restricted the search to just Psalm 75 for simplicity)

which comes up with the following results

I am concerned about the match on verse 4 (as tagged in AFPMA) as I don't think I would have expected that match to happen.

Does this help at all?

Graham

Nielsen Tomazini

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/145172#Comment_145172

Dear Graham,

First of all, thank you very much for your willingness to help.

You did help me.You gave me a good start.

Based on what you posted I made a small change on the syntax search:

You can see that all I did was to ask for clauses where the Finite Verb appears first. With this search verse 4 was removed from the result.
Now, that was a good start. I know very little on syntax search and your post has given me a good base for some different searches.

So, trying to another search I change it to restrict only to finite verbs with 3rd, masc., plural.This is what I did:

This is not ideal but may lead me to more similar clauses.
One question that I have at this point is if I can put a condition in that in the previous clause, whatever it contains, cannot have a subject that is a 3mp, so that it cannot be the subject for the sentence I am searching for. In this case I would have a situation like in Ps 75:2. I am making a couple of test here.

Thanks again for your help

davidphillips

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/145196#Comment_145196

Nielsen,

You can. However, there may be more than one clause intervening (as in Psalm 75:1-2). In the first search below, rather than specifying that the first clause wasn't 3rd masc plural, I specified that it wasn't the same as the second verb. It makes the search a little more general. Also, I added in an "anything" operator between the verb and object so that they don't have to appear right next to each other. You can remove it if you want them to immediately follow each other. The second picture is more specifically what you're looking for:

Nielsen Tomazini

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/145210#Comment_145210

Dear David,

Thank you for your post. I will try reproduce there searches and run it as soon as I can.

Blessings,