Syntax Searching Suggestion

Yeah, I had a feeling this would be the question -- and I was already been thinking about it when first wrote the post.

Rick Brannan said:

One question in thinking about this: How much to copy? The whole highlighted structure, with all node-level information for every node? So word nodes would have all properties (text, lemma, morph, gloss, louw-nida, etc.) Or none of it, just the structure (that can even be problematic)?

So here is my suggestion. I'm doing this backwards and trying to prioritize things with some reasoning behind my thoughts (that means that each of the items in the individual lists are ranked in priority in a "meta-list" across the board.

Things that don't need be copied:

1. Glosses.
   These are most definitely the lowest priority and are the least relevant to the Greek text & the purpose of syntax searching.
2. Text.
   While at time, I'm sure people have found this helpful, I have never used used it. Whenever I actually get to the word level in my searches, I'm either interested in only the lemma and where the lemma occurs in syntactic structure X OR I'm looking for particular morphology independent of the lemma. I can't say I've ever been interested in the inflectional form of a specific lemma -- though I would be interested in whether I'm a minority on that or not and would be interested if other syntax searches would chime in on this one.

Things that probably don't need to be copied:

1. L&N#'s.
   I was so close to putting this one in the list above, but then I remembered that in L4, it is possible to search through subdomains -- which is awesome; Rick, you've done great work here. In L3, I rarely used L&N#'s because the full domains were often way too broad too be terribly useful, unless you were specifically looking for something like "proper names" which actually made L&N rather nice.
2. Lemma (?).
   Just like I almost put L&N#'s in the list above, I almost post Lemma's in the the list below. On the one hand, I will admit to have done plenty of searches using the lemma, not as many as I have with morphology, but still a good number. But also, typically when I've used Lemma's in searches, I've been doing it to circumvent the fact that in L3, I couldn't use L&N subdomains, so both of these in this list pull me in both directions. In any case, Lemma's would be a lower priority for me. Besides, typing in the lemma is both easier and faster than typing/choosing morphology or L&N#'s.

Things that probably should be copied:

1. Morphology.
   Of the word level grammatical information, morphology is definitely what I use the most and I'm typically interested in morph info in the majority of the time. The main reason it isn't in the four category of "Things that should be copied" is that I would probably view removing it as more of a hassle than adding it. That's pretty subjective, but, hey, what can I say...? From the perspective of the user, the effort of removing something like @VAAM2P would probably be viewed a greater waste of time than adding @N[AD]SM.
2. Other Node Level Information Above the Word Level.
   Things like phrase types & grammatical relations (i.e. Opentext's Clause Categories & Cascadia's Clause Functions) should probably be copied. I would places these as a higher priority (as a user) for copying than Morphology simply because they generally more easily and faster removed since it's generally only one click per constituent.

Things that should be copied:

1. The Highlighted Syntactic Structure.
   Adding and deleting the nodes themselves is much faster & simpler in L4 than in L3 - particularly since you can now drag things around. That's awesome. Again, great work on this.

If I've missed anything, let me know and I'll give an opinion.

Rick Brannan said:

This is the first tough question, there are others. I'm not trying to brush off the suggestion; I'd rather try to figure out what folks mean/expect when copying a node to a search editor.

Yeah, I had a feeling that might be the case and I'm always willing to give feedback.