Search for Placement of Subordinate Clauses (Before vs. After the Main Clause)?

[Benjamin Noonan]

I am trying to search for subordinate clauses that appear before the main clause they accompany vs. after the main clause they accompany. For example: sometimes a causal כִּי-clause comes before the main clause (e.g., Gen 3:14) whereas other times it comes after the main clause (e.g., Gen 2:3). For this example, I would like to do two separate searches: one for all causal כִּי-clauses that come before the main clause, and one for all causal כִּי-clauses that come after the main clause.

 

Is there a way that you can search for the placement of subordinate clauses in either the HMT or ETCBC syntax modules? I haven't been able to figure out a way to do so. It may be there isn't a way, or it may be there is a way and I just don't know.

 

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Jordan S]

Ben,

Part of your question is simple. Unless you have the "Search both directions" button checked, the construct pane will respect the order of the constituents in your construct search. Right to left for Hebrew, of course.

 

 

Now, actually pulling off the search correctly and getting perfect results is the hard part. ETCBC is not going to work for you unless you are looking for כי as a complementizer. You'll need to use Holmstedt or A-F. In this example, I nested a dependent clause that begins with כי inside a predicate phrase followed by a null predicate that represents the main verb of the clause. This gives you Gen 3:14. You can remove the "Null" attribute to get more hits with overt main verbs. You can switch the order of "dependent" and "predicate" underneath "predicate phrase" for the opposite search. Just remember to leave the "search both directions" box unchecked. You can compare the syntax trees to see that ETCBC doesn't handle the dependent clauses like Holmstedt. You'll probably need to play with the depth ("0") to check the results, but this is at least how I would get started. 

 

 

 

[Benjamin Noonan]

Thanks, Jordan! That does the trick. The results do include some "false" hits, at least if you're only looking for causal כִּי-clauses, in that the results also include other types of subordinate כִּי-clauses that can appear before the main clause (e.g., temporal and conditional). But, I can easily go through the results and ignore those I don't need, and I'm interested in seeing what other types of כִּי-clauses appear before the main clause anyway. Thanks again for your help.