Searching for Concentrations of Vocabulary and/or Morphological Forms

[Benjamin Noonan]

I am trying to identify extended passages (whether chapters or shorter units) in the Hebrew Bible that have a high concentration of common vocabulary. I want to do this is so I can assign my first-year students passages that will consist largely of words they know. Assuming Accordance can do this, I would also be interested in applying the same approach to finding passages with concentrations of specific morphological forms, also for pedagogical purposes.

 

Is there a way to search for concentrations of common vocabulary and specific morphological forms in Accordance? (I apologize if someone has asked about this before, but I wasn't able to readily find anyone addressing this in the forums.)

[mgvh]

Roughly... if you have a list of words, just run an OR search. E.g.,

‏=שׁלם ‎<OR>‏ =חֶסֶד ‎<OR>‏ =אהב

Then use the HITS or ANALYSIS graph to see where the greatest concentration of those words occur.

[Benjamin Noonan]

Thanks, mgvh! This works as a rough solution, although it would be nice to be able to do exactly what I'm describing here. Perhaps Accordance could add this as a feature sometime in the future.

[Brian W. Davidson]

Adding a search feature like this would be very helpful for teachers. 

[Brian W. Davidson]

Just imagine if you could take a vocab list at the end of a grammar chapter, put those forms into Accordance, and Accordance could spit out a list of passages where there is the highest concentration of those words. That would be so awesome.

 

Or if you could say, Accordance show me all the passages with the highest concentration of words that occur 50–75 times.

[mgvh]

2 hours ago, Brian W. Davidson said:

Just imagine if you could take a vocab list at the end of a grammar chapter, put those forms into Accordance, and Accordance could spit out a list of passages where there is the highest concentration of those words. That would be so awesome.

 

Or if you could say, Accordance show me all the passages with the highest concentration of words that occur 50–75 times.

Well, Accordance can do that to some degree!

Use the COUNT command. E.g., with a tagged text:

[COUNT 50-75]

That will highlight all the words that occur 50-75x. Now use the Analytics and choose Table.

Then in the Settings, choose to set to "Show Chapter Detail." Then sort by average hits.

Another example, to find all lemmas that occur more than 100x, use [COUNT +100]

Check the Help for other options to look for inflected forms, etc.