Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Henry Churchyard <churchyh AT ccwf.cc.utexas.edu>]

> From: Kirk Lowery <KirkLowery AT xc.org>
> Date: Fri, 10 Jul 1998 10:56:53 -0400

> On Wed, 8 Jul 1998 13:44:48 -0400 B Rocine <596547 AT ican.net> wrote:

>> Now here's a wish I would like to pass onto our computer
>> text-taggers Dale Wheeler, Kirk Lowery, et al.: Tag the boundaries
>> of clauses.

> The other choice is to do the encoding *algorithmically*, i.e.,
> write a computer program to do it.  This has the advantage of
> absolutely consistent encoding, for the program will follow the
> rules given it.  But if one doesn't describe all the conditions,
> handle all the ambiguities, the program will stupidly follow the
> rules it was given and won't tell the user that there were
> situations it couldn't handle.

On the other hand, it's very easy to construct a nested (hierarchical)
"immediate constituent" parse from the Masoretic accents (though this
isn't syntactically-labelled, and doesn't exactly correspond to a
syntactic analysis, it still could be useful for some purposes).


>> While I'm at it, another wish: Tag the boundary between narration
>> and quoted speech.

> This will take *real* magic: imagine all the problems of citation
> (direct quote) boundaries in the prophets!

I like 2 Kings 1:6, which has four nested layers of quoted speech!


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