MA Thesis - Refined syntax trees

What's this?

During the course of my MA, I developed a method of extracting phrase-structure grammars from the Werkgroep Informatica Hebrew Bible produced since 1977 by Prof. Dr. Eep Talstra and his group at the Free University of Amsterdam.

The WI Hebrew Bible is the masoretic text analyzed syntactically. Dr. Talstra and his group have developed their own linguistic theory of Hebrew, and analyzed the Hebrew Bible accordingly.

The analysis in the WI Hebrew Bible is somewhat coarse-grained at first sight. There are only two levels of phrases, for example, not fully recursive structures. To make matters worse, the analysis is not a strict tree.

In my MA, I developed a method to transform the WI analysis to more traditional syntax trees. This page shows the syntax trees that resulted.

Trees

• Genesis 1:1-3

• Genesis 1

How do I read these trees?

Note that these syntax trees are not displayed in the traditional manner, but through the Monads dot Features formalism, which is implemented in the Emdros text database engine.

You are encouraged to visit the Emdros MdF page before reading these syntax trees, to get an idea of how to read them.

The only things you know after reading that are:

1. The ID (id_d) of each object is shown at the top of the object (e.g., "w: 10582" is a Word with id_d 10582.).

2. The "id_up" feature shows the id_d of the immediate ancestor of the object in the syntax tree.