Clauses

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Feb 22 06:36:22 EST 2000


At 8:53 PM -0800 2/21/00, C. E. Core wrote:
>Thanks to those that contributed information concerning a source of N.
>T. word parsing. I just picked up Friberg's. I liked that they included
>the text and some interesting notes in the back.
>
>Now on to another question. I am going to ask this the best I can and
>hope that it is the correct question for what I want to do.
>
>What I want to be able to do is find a way to link the subordinate
>clause, in any given passage, to the clause it modifies and more
>particularly to the term it modifies. And to know if it acts as an
>adjective, an adverb, or something else.
>Can the Gk. text do this in a mechanical way or is the context the only
>way to do this, or is there other options that I haven't included here?
>Any help with this is appreciated.
>in Christ -chris core

You've seen Clay's answer; there are some other programmers on the
list,including our list-owner, any of whom could give you at least a
theoretical answer. I'm by no means a programmer, but I don't see how this
could be done except at the most elementary level, as I think there are too
many variants, especially of word-order, to take account of. Perhaps more
important (to my perspective, at any rate), there would need to be a much
more thorough consensus  of the range of legitimate syntactical
relationships for this to be done in a way that isn't rather arbitrary and
subjective. Understanding larger and more complex syntactic units requires
a fair degree of human intelligence to begin with, and for that reason I
find it hard to see how artificial intelligence can sort out such units so
as to eliminate any ambiguity. I guess it would eliminate the value of such
a discussion-list as ours where we find ourselves discussing and debating
such items as whether EIS + accusative and EN + dative function for an
ordinary dative of indirect object (as we generally agree that PROS + acc.)
can do. I would think that the kind of consensus interpretation required
does not lie in the near future.


Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/



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