Morphological Search

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Olive Tree’s parsed texts provides the ability to see the parsing and dictionary form of any word in the text by simply tapping on a word. Another lesser known feature is the ability to perform morphological searches within these Bible texts.

There are two ways to perform these searches. This article will show you how to use both.

Predefined Searches

The first is to use one of the predefined searches presented in the parsing pop-up window. If you have already tapped on a word and would like to find other similar occurrences, the parsing popup provides three commonly used options. 

3_Options.png

  1. Search X in this form: The first link will initiate a search for all other occurrences of the same word in that same form. 
    Search_X_in_this_form.png
  2. Search all words in this form: The second link will search for any word that is in that particular grammatical form (more useful for unusual verb forms).  
    Search_all_words_in_this_form.png
  3. Lookup X: The third link will search for all occurrences of the word that was tapped on in any form. 
    Lookup_X.png

While these three options cover most use cases, they can only be accessed via the parsing popup and require you to first find an occurrence of the word in the form that you are interested in. If you do not know where to find an occurrence of that word, you may wish to do a manual search.

Manual Search

A manual search can be done by tapping on the search icon and keying in the word using Olive Tree's Morphological Search Syntax. This syntax is very simple. For most texts it follows this format:

WORD + [LEMMA] + [PARSING]

For example:

λαὸν[λαός][NAMS]

WORD_%252B__LEMMA__%252B__PARSING_.png

WORD_%252B__LEMMA__%252B__PARSING__Results.png

It is possible to replace these fields with wildcards (*). Rather than keying in the inflected form, we could also search for this and get the same results:

*[λαός][NAMS]

Asterisk________NAMS_.PNG

Asterisk________NAMS__Results.PNG

Or, if we wanted to occurrences of any word in this form, we could search for this:

*[NAMS]

Asterisk__NAMS_.PNG

Asterisk__NAMS__Results.PNG

On the other hand, the following search would yield all forms of the lemma:

*[λαός]* 

All_Forms_of_Lemma.png

All_Forms_of_Lemma_Results.png

Worth Noting

It is important to note that the wildcards before and after this field are required because the search has to account for the whole string, which follows the format WORD + [LEMMA] + [PARSING].

It is also worth noting that leaving out accents or vowel points will result in failed searches.

The parsing codes for the NA28 and the BHS can be found at the links below and the parsing codes of the AGNT are given in its introduction.

NA28 Parsings Guide

BHS Parsings Guide from Westminster (PDF)
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