Search For Person & Pronoun

[mariowlima]

Hi,

Is there a way to perform a search in Accordance's original language text to show all occurrences of a person's name (e.g. as subject) and also when that same person's name has been substituted by a pronoun (antecedent)?  For example, all occurrences of name Peter and "he", followed by a verb. 

Thanks in advance.  

[miketisdell]

37 minutes ago, mariowlima said:

Hi,

Is there a way to perform a search in Accordance's original language text to show all occurrences of a person's name (e.g. as subject) and also when that same person's name has been substituted by a pronoun (antecedent)?  For example, all occurrences of name Peter and "he", followed by a verb. 

Thanks in advance.  

I can't think of a way to do exactly what you want. And in some cases, it would be impossible because there are places where a pronoun is ambiguous. However, you could search for pronouns that match in gender that are within X  words of a proper name. You would want to make sure to include suffixed pronouns in your search. You also might want to change the scope to chapter so that you can search across verse boundaries. 

Note: if you want to find only proper names that are the subject, that can be done. 

[miketisdell]

59 minutes ago, mariowlima said:

Hi,

Is there a way to perform a search in Accordance's original language text to show all occurrences of a person's name (e.g. as subject) and also when that same person's name has been substituted by a pronoun (antecedent)?  For example, all occurrences of name Peter and "he", followed by a verb. 

Thanks in advance.  

I did take a quick look at syntax to see if there was anything additional I could use and I couldn't find anything. I think this would take a lot of work to identify both the false positives and false negatives. 

In this example, consider 1 Sam 17:31, 32 In vs. 31, we have both a proper name and a pronoun that stands for the same name, but in vs. 32 the pronoun that is found does not stand for the proper name but the 2nd person masculine singular pronoun that was not found (because it was not part of the search) does stand for the proper name. To find all occurrences, you would have to search for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person pronouns of the same gender to catch occurrences where the person identified by proper name speaks in the first person, or refers to himself in the 2nd person (as in verse 32). However, broadening the search will also increase the number of false positives.   

 

Here is the adapted search which no longer specifies the person, only gender and number, and in order to catch the 2nd person pronoun in vs. 32 I also had to increase the distance between the proper name from 8 words to 10 words (and that is still likely too short). This changed my results from 234 matches to 315 matches. 

 

[mariowlima]

Thanks for looking into this. This is helpful, I will attempt these, and feedback. Do you have any examples in GNT with an instance of the person/pronoun and an action/state (verb)? I was using Greek Construct (subject noun + verb in a clause) and managed to get all occurrences correctly with subject noun (person/proper name) but I can’t find a way that I could add/include an antecedent or precedent of the (proper) noun within certain number of words in a clause with the same verb.

The subject (person) + verb (action/state) should restrict the number of hits to only a few, but the trick is how to add cases (hits) when the person’s name is mentioned in a different clause than his personal pronouon + verb (action/state) is used which Accordance (construct or other method of) search would ideally find it as a hit… hope this makes sense. 

Edited February 13 by mariowlima

[Rick55]

10 hours ago, mariowlima said:

Hi,

Is there a way to perform a search in Accordance's original language text to show all occurrences of a person's name (e.g. as subject) and also when that same person's name has been substituted by a pronoun (antecedent)?  For example, all occurrences of name Peter and "he", followed by a verb. 

Thanks in advance.  

This would be great, especially in the KJV. 

 

Being able to search not just words in the English Language, but a syntax of it as well, wow what a blessing.