Bible senses for NT Greek prepositions
Could someone explain the rationale behind the Bible senses for Greek prepositions in Logos 10? OR perhaps this has been discussed previously and you could point me to that thread? OR even a location in the documentation? (My searches may have been poorly constructed, but I was unable to find this precise issue addressed.)
So selecting preposition en (roughly, “in”) “at” Heb 10.12 ESV and Bible senses section of Bible word study tool, offers 17“senses” (by rough count; for 48 occurrences [out of thousands in NT]) with, apparently, the object of the preposition taken as providing a particular “sense” for the preposition?
But selecting preposition peri (glossed often, at least with genitive i.o., as “concerning, about”) at 1 Jn 2.26, the sense section of Bible w.s. tool shows only a single “sense” of “sin offering” (for just 3 occurrences in Hebrews, out of over 300 NT references).
TY for any clarification to remove fog that may only exist in my own mind.
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have you read the documentation of which this is an excerpt?
[quote]
Sense Creation
Since one of the end goals of the Bible Sense Lexicon was enhanced search this would require an annotated text. The text could not be annotated without existing senses, so sense creation is where work began on each part of speech. We jumpstarted sense creation by generating a list of potential senses by cross-referencing glosses in Swanson’s Dictionary of Biblical Languages volumes on Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek with synonym sets in English WordNet.
Two subtasks followed. First, we vetted the list of potential senses by looking at a representative sample of the verse references in the Dictionary of Biblical Languages volumes associated with the lemmas under consideration. We also compared the analysis in the Dictionary of Biblical Languages with other standard lexica. When a WordNet sense (or multiple WordNet senses) seemed appropriate for a word in a biblical language that sense was kept, whereas those that did not seem like genuine senses were discarded. Sometimes the cross-referencing did not result in any potential senses, especially for rare biblical language words. In these cases, a sense was created based on analysis of the meaning of the word in all current standard lexica and by looking at the word in its contexts.
Second, in the midst of sense creation, we made connections between Bible Sense Lexicon senses and WordNet synonym sets for the purposes of building a hierarchy and creating other relationships between senses later. The connections were made by either positing that a biblical language sense was a near synonym of a WordNet sense, or where that was not possible, by positing the most likely WordNet sense that the could be the hypernym of the biblical language sense.
Jeremy Thompson, Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation (Bellingham, WA: Faithlife, 2015).But the en at Heb 10:12 has no sense coding shown either in the reverse interlinear nor in the context menu. An example of where en is code is shown here:
Personally I would report this as a coding error because the sense of "to baptize" does not need to be implied with the preposition. The verb and the object of the preposition already cover it. I would argue that prepositions are function words and hence should not be given senses.
[quote]
Another limitation of the Bible Sense Lexicon is that it covers only content words as opposed to function words. The distinction between content words and function words can get blurry; however, content words include words like “create,” “God,” and “justice,” whereas function words include words like “and,” “the,” and “from.” Especially when looking at tools like the reverse interlinear line, this can make the Bible Sense Lexicon seem incomplete since function words make up the bulk of words in any given discourse. But, like the creators of WordNet, we considered these words as matters more for grammars than for lexica. In general, users are more likely to look up content words as opposed to function words within the software.
Jeremy Thompson, Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation (Bellingham, WA: Faithlife, 2015).
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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I looked specifically for prepositions in the documentation and so did not see that. Good to know. TY!
Would it be accurate to say then that the Bible senses for prepositions are 1) a work in progress and 2) any represented "senses" for prepositions may not only be incomplete; but, when represented, they reflect primarily the nuance of the attached indirect object, rather than the preposition itself?0 -
I re-read your post and heartily agree with you that function words should not be assigned any (incomplete) senses, if the caveat about function words is to make sense. Seems like the software wants to have it both ways: Insisting function words are only grammatical and not lexical/semantic, yet including some senses for some function words. (Sorry, I chuckle over idea that prepositions, as a sub-species of function words, are more for grammars than lexica; an entry for a single Hebrew preposition in a Hebrew lexicon can span 14 pages or more; maybe they should have cut out the entry and just left it to grammarians!) TY again for bringing me some clarity (and a little personal levity.)
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I am delighted to see that you have the right attitude to go far in making Logos meet you needs despite its entertaining quirks. It is a powerful tool, occasionally in spite of itself.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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