Syntax Search Problem

Challenge #2

2nd class conditional.

Protasis: εἰ + indicative; past tense (aorist, imperfect); (negative: μή) Apodosis: (ἄν) + indicative; past tense (aorist (past time); imperfect (present time);

Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics - Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament ( (Zondervan Publishing House and Galaxie Software, 1999; 2002)), 689.

Examples

Luke 7:39; John 5:46; 1 Cor 2:8

See also: Wallace pg 694-696

[I haven't tried this one yet, but I'll work on it tomorrow [:)]]

Dave Hooton said:

I'm not sure that Optional is handled correctly - whether "May or may not appear" or "0-1", especially at the clause level. So I drop it. The anarthrous case is handled well but you will note some simplifications in my solution.

I agree with the dropping the may or may not be present for the subject-less Genitive Absolutes; it introduces too much noise into the results. Dave I compared my search (functionally equivalent to yours) against Wallace's example lists. There were a couple of examples that Cascadia had in a CL* so I dropped Head = No in Clause 1 (Although most of these were Noun/Pronoun-less Gen Absolutes but Acts 13:2 is an example that would be excluded by specifying Head=No). Also, I found an example where the Participle was classified as Verbal Complement to I added that as an option. I retained 2 words for the Noun/Pronoun simply because I like the way it looks [:)]. So, here's the picture:

Gary O'Neal said:

Also, could you clarify why the subject function appearing 0 or 1 times would not work

It's not that it won't work. It should perform the same as "may or may not appear." However, the difficulty is that this essentially makes the search catch every anarthous genitive participle, the majority of which are probably not genitive absolutes, hence my comment about introducing too much noise (that along with multiple hits for introduced by matching skips levels).

One of the difficulties with Syntax search is that these forms (Genitive Absolute, 2nd class conditionals) is that writers don't always follow the "rules." For example there's at least one 2nd class conditional that doesn't have the particle αν but you know it's 2nd class because it's negated by μη but if you make αν optional you'll grab a bunch of 1st class conditionals in your search results (Perhaps there's a way to say include αν's absence only if μη is used, but I haven't figured it out.)

In the end, it's probably not about syntax searches being inaccurate but incomplete due to grammar/syntax "errors" and/or ellipsis. If you want scholarly complete lists you're going to have to construct both syntax searches and Morph searches so broad that they get lots of false hits you manually sift out. Once verse lists are re-introduced it should be easier to compare the variation in search results introduced my more permissive terms.

Dave Hooton said:

Note that I have adopted part of Kevin's suggestion, but I decided to show only the head Subject e.g. 1 out of the 3 possible results for Matt 1:18. This will return 656 results. Unfortunately there are some false positives because a subordinate clause may also be a head clause. This is the value of comparing Syntax results with those from independent sources, but also illustrates the weakness that any method of analysis will be biased and/or include errors.

Of the results from Wallace it is missing Matt 8:16 and Jn 4:50. Matt 8:16 would be included if I added the Verbal Complement to the second structure as per Kevin (giving an extra 32 results) but Jn 4:50 appears to be a typo for Jn 4:51 (no genitive participle).

Good observations Dave. I noticed the John 4 typo too and added a note to my copy of Wallace. The benefit of embedding the noun/pronoun option in the subject node is that it reduces the duplicate hits introduced by skipping levels. I'm going to take your suggestion and modify my search. I wish there was an option that the search algorithm could filter out the multiple hits on a structure so the hit count would be more accurate. As is, it's possible to have two people comparing search results and the one with the higher hit count could have actually found fewer examples of the structure.