TASK IV

I took four narrative texts from the Greek Testament - Gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, plus Acts of the Apostles. These do contain discourses such as speeches, but the majority of the text would be narratives.

As I posted elsewhere, the software and tagging for Biblical studies is quite advanced. The one feature that I am most interested in and I have never seen in Biblical studies is collocation. I uploaded the texts into AntConc. I thought maybe Antconc could simply find common collocations in all the texts without putting in a search item, but I couldn't figure out how. I entered a common word that might yield some interesting collocations, ἐστιν [he/she/it is].

The results really have my imagination rolling. Some of the more common collocations wouldn't take a search engine like AntConc to figure out, for example οὗτος ἐστιν [He is]. That combination yields 54 hits in all five texts. But that led me to research an collocation with γὰρ /gar/ [a word that marks that the following explains the foregoing]. I found that nearly all uses of γὰρ is a collocation with ἐστιν. The potential for finding and targeting collocations for Ancient Greek is exciting.

I was very impressed that AntConc could handle polytonic Greek. Modern Greek is usually processed just fine, but Ancient Greek has many special diacritics and often makes computer programs behave badly. The only glitch I had was that I could not type polytonic Greek into a search box. I couldn't even type in Word and then paste it in. I needed to find the word I wanted from the Wordlist and click on it.

Doing more analysis of these texts will be interesting. I think I could improve the search by doing two things. First I need to strip out all references (each verse is marked, such as "Mt 3:10…"). That should be easy with MS Word's powerful search and replace. Secondly, I would like to strip out all non-narrative text. This would be much harder to do. If I cannot find a semi-automated way to do it, I will leave it as is.

As noted above, the texts making up this corpus are:

• Gospel According to Matthew
• Gospel According to Mark
• Gospel According to Luke
• Gospel According to John
• Acts of the Apostles

The text version (not translation) is SBL Greek New Testament (SBLGNT)

http://sblgnt.com/download/