TIP of the day: subject vs. nominative vs. agent

1. One of the best ways to learn how to build searches and interpret Logos coding is to run related searches to see if you can explain the differences in results. We'll begin with the "<person>" search used in yesterday's TIP of the day which gave a manageable 5 results.

2. Using a clause search, we can look for all the cases in which the grammatical subject is Judas (son of James). From:Lukaszewski, Albert L. The Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament Glossary. Lexham Press, 2007. "subject: The sentential element which, in the context of a given clause, performs or causes the main verbal action. (References:　BDF n/a; Wallace p. 401-404; Smyth §902.)" Only 3 of the 5 references are tagged as "subject".

3. Using a morphology search we can look for cases in which the lemma for Judas is in Nominative form and restrict the results to Judas (son of James) by adding the WITHIN 0 WORDS parameter. From Heiser, Michael S., and Vincent M. Setterholm. Glossary of Morpho-Syntactic Database Terminology. Lexham Press, 2013; 2013. "nominative — The case that normally refers to the subject of a verb or a noun following a form of the verb "to be" or "to become" (ie, a predicate nominative) that renames the subject." 4 of the 5 results meet this criteria.

4. Using the Clause search we can search for cases where Judas (son of James) has the sematic role of agent. From Thompson, Jeremy. The Lexham Glossary of Semantic Roles. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2014. "Agent — The person or thing that instigates an action or causes change in another person or thing; for example, "David (Agent) struck Goliath" or "David (Agent) killed Goliath."" Only 2 of the 5 cases meet this condition.

5. Luke 16:6 meets the lemma, morphology and person requirements.

6. John 14:22 meets the lemma, morphology and person requirements.

7. John 14:23 does not meet the lemma or morphology requirements although it does meet the person requirements.

8. Acts 1:13 meets the lemma, morphology and person requirements.

9. Jude 3 does not meet the lemma or morphology requirements although it does meet the person requirements.. However, I believe that meeting the person requirement is an error in Logos coding and have reported it as such. Judas (brother of Jesus) is the coding for most of the book.

10. To check whether or not the Agent requirement is met, run Factbook on Judas (son of James) and check the Agent section. Only John 14:22 and Jude 3 (which we noted as an error) meet the Agent requirement.

11. To check the Subject requirement, one may have to resort to Clause Visualizations; However, one can first try the Example Uses section of BWS. In this case, the BWS is not particularly helpful.

12. The Clause Visualization shows that the subject Judas (son of James) was double counted in John 14:22 and confirms the John 14:23 Judas is not the subject. I'll let you check the remaining 3 references.