Posts tagged with "Logos 6"

Searching Semantic Roles is Awesome in Logos 6 #Logos6

Last week I wrote a post about exploring meaning using case frames in Logos 6. I plan to come back to that topic with more practical examples in the near future, but I also wanted to introduce you to the semantic roles data on its own terms by taking a look at how these roles have enhanced clause search. By the end of this post, I think you will agree with me that this dataset is, quite frankly, awesome.

First, a brief aside: the case frame data that I talked about in the last post is made up of the semantic roles data. The important point here is that you can approach this data by looking at case frames as units of analysis or by individual semantic roles as units of analysis. If that doesn’t make sense at this stage, it’s not so important, but it may help to know that the case frames and semantic roles are interrelated.

Now I will inductively work through an example that I think will demonstrate just how exciting this new feature is.  Imagine for a moment that we want to find all of the places in the Bible that talk about Jesus being baptized. In the past, we might have tried to accomplish this by using clause search and the grammatical categories of ‘subject’ and ‘object.’

First, we might think: John the Baptist (subject) baptized Jesus (object). So, our first search might be something like “object:Jesus verb-lemma:βαπτίζω.”  Let’s check out the results of this search:

jesus object baptize

Nothing.

What’s the issue? … We forgot to take into account the passive voice. Maybe all of the cases of Jesus being baptized are more like: Jesus (subject) was baptized by John.  Our next search might end up as “subject:Jesus verb-lemma:βαπτίζω.” Here’s what we would find:
jesus subject baptize

This is obviously better; however, we’ve still got some noise in our search. We’re seeing instances that mention Jesus actually doing the baptizing. Is there a better way to do this?

If we think briefly about the semantic roles for βαπτιζω, it is possible to find a better way. A look at the semantic roles for βαπτιζω tells us that the person being baptized in each case is a “Theme.” With that little bit of knowledge, it is possible to search by meaning (i.e., semantics), as opposed to grammatical categories like subject and object that don’t always overlap completely with meaning.

If the previous paragraph was too much to parse, don’t worry about it because I think the next example search will make it easier to understand. What if we were to try “theme:Jesus verb-lemma:βαπτίζω”? Here’s what we would find:

jesus theme baptize

Jackpot! Take a look at the results. Now we’re seeing exactly what we want. But wait … there’s more. What if on the other hand, we wanted to find all of the places that mention Jesus doing the baptizing (for example, baptizing with the Holy Spirit)?  Another brief reflection on the semantic roles of βαπτιζω would tell us that the person doing the baptizing is an “Agent.” Maybe we could try “agent:Jesus verb-lemma:βαπτίζω”:

jesus agent baptize

Bingo! Our ability to search the Bible becomes so much more powerful when we are searching by meaning as opposed to searching by grammatical categories.  I hope that this example has demonstrated that it is worth the time to get to know the semantic roles data because it could save you a lot of time in the long run.

So, go buy Logos 6 if you haven’t already! Then feel free to ask any questions about semantic roles here or in the Logos forums. Or, drop a cool example of how you’re using this tool in the comments below.

Explore Meaning with Case-frames in Logos 6 (Or, what I’ve worked on for the last year) #Logos6

Rick has already posted some of his favorite features in Logos 6. So, I thought I’d take some time to post on my favorite feature in Logos 6 while also mimicking his post title. Incidentally, I’m biased because I worked on the Hebrew data for this project. Paul Danove (whose work really inspired this feature) provided initial Greek data, and Mike Aubrey continued that work.

Case-frames provide a new way of exploring meaning within Logos 6. It may not be apparent on first glance how they do this. Here I will work from an English example to an original language example to demonstrate how this works.

Consider an English verb like “return.” This verb can have several different meanings as in the following sentences:

  1. He returned home.
  2. He returned the donkey to its pen.

In the first case, we might paraphrase “return” as “go back”: “He went back home.” In the second, we might somewhat poorly paraphrase as “bring back” (perhaps this isn’t the only possible interpretation, but this is only an example): “He brought the donkey back to its pen.”

The difference in these two meanings of “return” is reflected in the number of “arguments” that the verb takes in each example. I don’t want to get bogged down what an argument is, but it is linguistic unit (word, phrase, clause) that is required to determine the meaning of a verb (or some other kind of predicate). In the first example above, the verb has two arguments: someone (an Agent) who is going back somewhere and the place (Goal) to which the person is returning. The second example has three arguments: the person (an Agent) returning something, the object (a Theme) that is being returned, and the place (a Goal) to which the object is being returned.  As hinted at above, these arguments are labeled with roles like “Agent,” “Theme,” and “Goal” in a case-frame analysis. A fuller discussion of each one of these roles can be found in the glossary of semantic roles in Logos 6.

An analysis of the arguments in the two examples above would look something like this:

  1. [Agent He] returned [Goal  home].
  2. [Agent He] returned [Theme the donkey] [Goal to its pen].

The meaning of the verb “return” in the first example is reflected in the pattern Agent – Goal and the second meaning is reflected in the pattern Agent– Theme– Goal. Thus, the meaning of “return” is related to the construction in which it is involved.

Of course, every language has important differences. But, these underlying patterns also occur in a language like Hebrew (though in Hebrew the differences between the two meanings discussed above are also somewhat reflected morphologically – qal vs. hiphil –  for those who know their Hebrew).

The Biblical Hebrew word most often rendered “return” by English translations is שׁוב (šwb). To see how we can explore the meanings of this verb by looking at its patterns like we did for the English examples the first thing we want to do is run a Bible Word Study. So open up the Bible Word Study guide:

bws

Since this isn’t really a tutorial on how to work with Hebrew in Logos I’ll give you the easy version of how to search for our Hebrew word. In the top left search box we can enter “h:shwb” then select the appropriate Hebrew word from the dropdown:

bwsedit

Once the guide has finished gathering all of the necessary information make sure the “case-frames” section is expanded by clicking the arrow next to “case-frames”:

return2

And now we can look for the patterns that we’ve discussed so far, which I’ve highlighted already. We can open up the search results for each one of these patterns by clicking on the appropriate section of the case-frame wheel.  For the Agent – Goal pattern we see the following:

return3

We notice right off that case-frames can either be abstract (“the deeds of a man’s hands will return to him”) or concrete, and we see concrete examples of the Agent– Goal pattern, such as Gen 8:9 “… [Agent she] returned [Goal to him] … “ and Gen 15:16 “… [Agent they] will return [Goal here] …” Again, these examples approximate the English example of “He returned home” that we looked at above.

When we look closer at the Agent– Theme– Goal pattern we see the following:

return4

One interesting matter to note here is that the translation generally doesn’t use the word “return,” so if we were just looking at an English translation we may have no idea that these usages were related to the same verb as the Agent – Goal pattern. Again, we have some abstract and some concrete examples. Concrete examples occur in places like Gen 29:3 “[Agent (they)] put the stone back in (i.e., return the stone to) its place on the mouth of the well” and Gen 28:15 “[Agent (I)] will bring you back (i.e., return you) to this land.” Again, these meanings of שׁוב (šwb) approximate the meaning we discussed in the second example above: “He returned the donkey to its pen.”

To summarize, we can see here how different meanings of verbs can involve different patterns of semantic roles. We particularly looked at the English example of “return” and how to look at similar examples in a language like Hebrew using the case-frames analysis in Logos 6. This was only an introduction using a common English example, but there is a vast amount of semantic information to explore here. And I’m pretty excited about that. So, go buy Logos 6! Then, explore the new case-frames feature and drop a comment below with a favorite example. And if you have any question about this feature or any other, please feel free to ask. If I know the answer, I’ll help the best way I can. And if I don’t know they answer, I’ll try to point you in the right direction.