Excluding a term in a morph search

Chas
Chas Member Posts: 49 ✭✭
edited November 2024 in English Forum

In the Greek text of the New Testament, I'm wanting to look at sequences consisting of a participle followed by a verb in the imperative mood. I'm using this search string:

<LogosMorphGr ~ V??P????>  WITHIN 1 WORD <LogosMorphGr ~ V??M????>

The problem is that this brings up all the many instances when the participle in slot 1 of the search sequence is a speech orienter (or quotative) like "saying". I'd like to exclude these. If I could exclude participles formed from the verb λέγω, that would take care of most of these.

For example, I would like for my search to find Matt. 2:20 ("Rise, take the child and his mother and go ..."), where "rise" in the Gk is a participle usually translated into English as an imperative. But I want to exclude Matt. 8:25 ("And they went and woke him, saying, "Save us, Lord ...").

Note that the exclusion needs to apply to the participle in slot 1 of the query string and not to a participle that might occur previously. For example, I wouldn't want to exclude something like, "He spoke to the man, saying, "Rise, pick up your bed ...". In this example, the speech orienter "saying" is a participle immediately preceding the participle I'm designating in slot 1 of my search sequence.

Thanks for any help!

Comments

  • Reuben Helmuth
    Reuben Helmuth MVP Posts: 2,485

    Have you tried the morph query builder rather than a simple search? Do you have access to it? I believe you would need to be subscribed to Faithlife Connect in order to have this. It's much more flexible and powerful in these situations!

  • Chas
    Chas Member Posts: 49 ✭✭

    Thank you, Reuben. That's a pretty slick feature. I'm still not able to tell it what I want to do, though. Maybe you or someone else has an idea. In fact, I'm at exactly the same place as I was with the standard morph search feature.

    Using the Morph Query Builder:

    In the column headed "Word 1", I have "Verb" for Part of Speech and "Participle" for Mood.

    In the column headed "Word 2", I have "Verb" for Part of Speech and "Imperative" for Mood.

    I set the Search Span for "1 Word".

    What I now want to do is to define for "Lemma" under "Word 1" something that says "NOT lemma:λέγω". I don't see any way to include a "not" operator.

    Any ideas, anyone? Thank you!

  • Mark Barnes
    Mark Barnes Member Posts: 15,432 ✭✭✭

    In theory, this should do it (notice I changing WITHIN 1 WORD to BEFORE 1 WORD):

    (<LogosMorphGr ~ V??P????> NOT INTERSECTS <Root = lbs/el/λεγω>)  BEFORE 1 WORD <LogosMorphGr ~ V??M????>

    But it still excludes Matthew 2:20. I'm not sure why. However, this works:

    (<LogosMorphGr ~ V??P????> NOTEQUALS <Root = lbs/el/λεγω>)  BEFORE 1 WORD <LogosMorphGr ~ V??M????>

    This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!

  • Chas
    Chas Member Posts: 49 ✭✭

    @Mark Barnes: Bingo! Thank you very much.

    @Reuben Helmuth: Though this could be done with the standard morph search capability, I'm glad to know about the Morph Query Builder feature, too.

    Over and out,

    -Chas