Parsing Greek texts

Stephen Hughes
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Re: Parsing Greek texts

Post by Stephen Hughes »

Alan Bunning wrote:
Stephen Hughes wrote:
Alan Bunning wrote:I am not sure that I can tell the difference. I don't trust my own parsings enough to think that someone else has an error. I usually think there might be another valid way to label it, or else that I might be wrong. That is why I was looking for help.
Parsing is fairly straightforward - identify the parts of speech and their declensions and conjugations at a word level. Catergorising the syntactical elements and their functions at a phrase and paragraph level is a bit more involved. What you are asking about here is a combination of single phrase and paragraph functions of καθώς. At a word level, it is not declined or conjugated - it is technically indeclinable.
Well, no at this time I am only interested in parsing at the word level and the 180 or so differences I want to resolve at that level were apparently not straightforward to someone. Robie and Tauber have gone beyond that and are doing syntax trees.
A word with both a phrase and syntactic level functionality - like καθώς - will have its name given to reflect the relationship that it makes between the phrase that follows it and the other phrases (units of text based on verbs) that occur in the same paragraph. Within a single phrase you can limit yourself to word-level analysis - where words relate to other words, but this is a word that relates phrases to each other.

Let me try to think within the limitations of your analytical system. (Currencies where small denominations can buy large items have less flexibility in pricing than currencies when large denominations are needed for small things.) All models are simplifications. That is how we cope with information.

If the scope and requirements of your analytical methodology require you to stay at a word-level analysis, then I think that you would have to name it a conjunction. Its function at a word-level is that it joins what is before with what is after. It is not an adverb, if at a word-level, an adverb is a single word called "adverb", any more than a preposition is called an adverb when it designates a nominal phrase as adverbial - there are prepositions which are regularly part of the verbal phrases, and other that are used more freely, then καθώς is not an adverb.

Your καθώς designates that the phrase that follow it is adverbial, but it itself is not adverbial (an adverb), it is an "adverbialiser" if you like. It is one of the ways (the others I listed above were only from memory, so don't treat that list as exhaustive) that Greek makes a verb or verbal phrase adverbial. Without out the verbal phrase that follows it, it does not have the ability to exist as an adverb in the way that say οὕτως "thus" does.

Why? Because the preposition κατά (καθ' before vowels with the spiritus asper) doesn't have sense without a noun or nominal phrase following it, while οὕτως derives from the demonstrative pronoun οὗτος which refers to something outside itself which is not necessarily in close proximity to it (within the word order) but is there never-the-less in the text. In the same way that a preposition needs the nominal phrase that follows it, so this καθώς needs the verbal phrase that follow it.

Looking at only the word itself, and giving it a name, it would be "conjunction", saying to the reader / listener "I am making a break now between the preceding and following parts of the text. The type of conjunction it is, is as Barry has pointed out - "adverbial conjunction". I am saying that "adverbial" in this case means turning a phrase based on a verb into an adverb. At a phrase or pharagraph-level of analysis, when the word καθώς is taken together with the verbal phrase that follow it, it is an adverbial conjunction. If a preposition were taken with the phrase after it, it could be designated as an adverbial prepositional phrase.

Is what I've written too dense (or am I the writer too dense)?
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
Alan Bunning
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Re: Parsing Greek texts

Post by Alan Bunning »

Stephen Hughes wrote:Is what I've written too dense (or am I the writer too dense)?
That was actually pretty helpful to me. I just don't have any idea what to do about it now. I am leaning toward labeling it a conjunction with an adverbial type as a second attribute. How many other words, or are their any other words that would fit this same category?
Stephen Hughes
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Re: Parsing Greek texts

Post by Stephen Hughes »

Alan Bunning wrote:
Stephen Hughes wrote:Is what I've written too dense (or am I the writer too dense)?
That was actually pretty helpful to me.
I don't have a ready list. Let me screw up your grammar for a moment, then I'll ask you to do a search, if you have the tools to do that.

What is a relative (e.g. ὅς, ἥ, ὅ) ? Functionally, it is an adjective - a phrasal variation on the primal adjective ἄλλος. It adds information to an element in one verbal phrase, by applying another verbal phrase to the same element. As it comes to us in Greek, it is basically a spiritus asper plus the adjectival endings. Simple enough.

Now, that works for nominal elements surrounding the verb - one is brought into the centre of attention, and information brought into association with it, by construction the relative clause. When the verb - supported by the subject, objects and other things is what is being used to make some feature of the other verbal phrase clearer or interpreted in another way, then the spiritus asper plus the adverbial ending -ως. There are a number of uses of ὡς so don't do any global replacements. You could think of ὡς as an adverbial relative and not be far wrong. Whether there would be any benefit in doing that is another matter. Thinking of καθώς as a prepositional adverbialising relative would also probably make understanding the syntax in certain sentence types easier, but maybe not. It is another way to analyse the Greek language, rather than the way that is often portrayed as the norm.

There is another type of adjectival marker, the -ον or -α of the neuter. In a way, you could categorise all words that mark out phrases to be used adverbially together, but that is going into syntactic analysis, rather than word categorisation.

Another problem is that because our reference materials are geared towards translation not understanding, dictionary entries for such words tend to give ways of rendering them into English, rather than model sentence patterns which such structural words play a part in. They are grammar words. The fallacy that a word is mastered if it can be both named and translated sails very close to the shoals in the case of such words. To master these, one needs to be able reproduce the syntactic structures in which they are found and understand the relationship between the elements that those structures contain.

Now, don't go doing something like recategorising everything as "adverbial relatives" or something like that. The green men in grey suits tend to steer things here with a fairly close-hauled rig. My luffy explanations tend to slow things down, and need to be put back on course, so remember the market you are targeting consists of people who are on the whole trained to look at grammar / syntax through non-magnifying telescopes - they just get a narrower view with no added detail.

As for finding other words that work at a clause and paragraph level, while being tagged at a word level... Do a search, if you can for elements such as those ending in -ως which are not classified as adverbs. Then there are the neuter words.
Alan Bunning wrote:I just don't have any idea what to do about it now. I am leaning toward labeling it a conjunction with an adverbial type as a second attribute.
As I've stated before, in general, my Greek suffers from my having a Borderline Pass Degree. Besides Sanskrit and some units of Modern Greek, most of my formal study at Bachelor's level was not of a very good standard at all. You should perhaps wait for the responses of others whose academic achievements and credentials are sounder.
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
Jonathan Robie
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Re: Parsing Greek texts

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Some of this depends on your goals. Do you want people to be able to do queries on your data using the same scheme used in the morphologies and syntax trees for SBLGNT and Nestle 1904? That can be useful for people who don't want to learn a different scheme for each set of data, and it also makes it easier to create syntax trees for your data. But it requires doing things the same way.

Or do you have a particular understanding of morphology you want to record in your data because it is better, at the cost of compatibility, even if nobody else is doing it that way?

To me, compatibility is really helpful, since I want to be able to query various texts without changing what I'm doing each time. And little differences like exactly how a conjunction with an adverbial type is labelled will mess people up, especially if the system is otherwise the same. Queries will give the wrong answer, and people won't know why unless they carefully read your description of how you labeled a conjunction with adverbial type. In general, I see real value to doing things the same way in datasets like these, even though the people creating each dataset have different preferences.

Of course, it's your data, and you can do this any way you want. And I'm very grateful for this data. For my own work, I've been using the MorphGNT analysis, converting them to the labels used by the Perseus folks in syntax trees (these labels are based on Smyth).
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Alan Bunning
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Re: Parsing Greek texts

Post by Alan Bunning »

Jonathan Robie wrote:Or do you have a particular understanding of morphology you want to record in your data because it is better, at the cost of compatibility, even if nobody else is doing it that way?
Right now, I think my parsing scheme is slightly better than Tauber’s, but is very similar. My format is only 8 bytes instead of 10, and yet it contains more details. I am not worried about compatibility that much because my format can quickly be converted to Tauber’s format (that is how I am able to compare them). For example, if I were to mark καθὼς as a conjunction with an adverbial type, in order to convert to Tauber’s format I would merely need to strip off the adverbial type attribute. Also, having the same format may not help as much if we end up labelling things differently in over 180 cases. But I am certainly in favor of syncing up as much as possible, that is why I started this thread to see if there could be any consensus on these things.

PS. Jonathan, I tried twice to send you a sample of my data in XML format with the metadata added in, but got no response, so I am not sure if there is a technical difficulty or if you haven’t got around to looking at it yet.
Jonathan Robie
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Re: Parsing Greek texts

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Alan Bunning wrote:
Jonathan Robie wrote:Or do you have a particular understanding of morphology you want to record in your data because it is better, at the cost of compatibility, even if nobody else is doing it that way?
Right now, I think my parsing scheme is slightly better than Tauber’s, but is very similar. My format is only 8 bytes instead of 10, and yet it contains more details. I am not worried about compatibility that much because my format can quickly be converted to Tauber’s format (that is how I am able to compare them). For example, if I were to mark καθὼς as a conjunction with an adverbial type, in order to convert to Tauber’s format I would merely need to strip off the adverbial type attribute. Also, having the same format may not help as much if we end up labelling things differently in over 180 cases. But I am certainly in favor of syncing up as much as possible, that is why I started this thread to see if there could be any consensus on these things.
As long as it's quick to convert to Tauber format, I think we're good.
Alan Bunning wrote:PS. Jonathan, I tried twice to send you a sample of my data in XML format with the metadata added in, but got no response, so I am not sure if there is a technical difficulty or if you haven’t got around to looking at it yet.
Yes, sorry about that - I'm a bit flooded, I will get to this in the next couple of days.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
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