Meaning of "gap" and "group" in syntax search?

Philip E. Sumpter
Philip E. Sumpter Member Posts: 132 ✭✭
edited November 2024 in English Forum

Could someone exlpain the meaning of the terms "gap" and "group" in the A-F syntax search? 

Thanks in advance.

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  • Dave Hooton
    Dave Hooton MVP Posts: 36,091

    Philip

    "Gap" arises when a construct includes words out-of-order from the original text. Where you see arrow lines crossing over others (in the Clause/Phrase Analysis) the words in between are in the "gap". The need to use "gap" arises only when you are searching for that construct AND the words in between. You may not even be aware of this when you build your query and it is extremely difficult to allow for results that may be in gaps. So difficult that nobody bothers.

    You typically use (ordered) Group where you want a specific order of some terms within an Unordered Group. For explanation of the latter see http://wiki.logos.com/A_Strategy_for_Syntax_Search

    Dave
    ===

    Windows 11 & Android 13

  • Philip E. Sumpter
    Philip E. Sumpter Member Posts: 132 ✭✭
    https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/119516#Comment_119516

    Thanks for your reply! That was really helpful, especially as it helps me re-create, to a degree, the syntax of Ps 122:7-8, as discussed in the comments here http://community.logos.com/forums/t/12328.aspx?PageIndex=2. 

    Here are my logical steps:

    image

    Here you have "crossing lines" in the sense of ellipsis of the verb and benefactive. Your term "structure" could refer to any one of those clauses. If we take the first one, the structure is Clause: vb-subj-loc-benef and the "words in between" are שַׁלְוֶה בְּאַרמְנֹתַיךְ. The syntax search which throws up this sentence along with one in Chronicles looks like this: image 

    If you were interested in cases where the the words שׁלום and שׁלו occur in parallel clauses linked by the ellipsis of the verb, you could boil it down to this search:

    image

    One challenge I had when trying to boil down the first search to the more reduced version was figuring out on what level the gap-node needs to be set (i.e. what is its authority?). The search didn't work if there was a "gap" between two segments. For some reason, the gap has to be at the level of the CIC. I also originally used "unordered group" instead of "Anything," which produced hundreds of hits because, for some inexplicable reason, every case where the word שׁלום occurred in a clause was given. I don't know why שׁלו was felt to be expendable in that case.

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