Morph search in Logos 2.0

Randy Leedy (RLEEDY@wpo.bju.edu)
Fri, 20 Sep 1996 09:44:44 -0400

Andrew Kulikovsky raises a question about searching for a double
accusative in Logos 2.0.

Andrew, I think you're probably going to have a lot of trouble with
this search. You didn't say how you were constructing it. One
limitation you must know about is that Logos does not allow wildcard
characters in a phrase search. (It always returns "no matches
found.") So if you're using the phrase search to look for two
adjacent accusative nouns, you can't do it using wildcards. You'd
have to search each gender and number separately.

Of course, double accusatives more often than not will have words
intervening between the nouns, so a phrase search is not the best
thing to try anyway. The WITHINWORD operator makes better sense, but
I've found that it ordinarly returns all kinds of garbage that don't
fit the criteria (even in the 2.0c upgrade).

I'm very impressed with Logos overall, but not with its morphology
searches. If you're going to be really serious about searching
grammatical constructions, I think you're going to have a hard time
being happy with anything except Gramcord (or AcCordance for the Mac,
which I know nothing about except for some very positive hearsay).

Andrew, I have a review of Logos (comparing it with BibleWorks for
Windows) that I can send you, if you don't already have it. In it I
discussed some of Logos' limitations in morph searches, although I
don't think I said a whole lot more than I said here. (I can send the
review to anyone else who may want it; reply off the list, please.)

----------------------------
In Love to God and Neighbor,
Randy Leedy
Bob Jones University
Greenville, SC
RLeedy@wpo.bju.edu
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