Since the ETS program book is out, and the SBL program book has been out for awhile, I thought I should note when I'm presenting at both of these conferences.

ETS 2006: Thursday Morning, Nov. 16; the New Testament session in the 'Slate' room, from 11:00-11:40.

Subjects and Predicates and Complements, Oh My! Searching the New Testament with Sensitivity to Syntax

Logos Bible Software have implemented an edition of the OpenText.org Syntactically Annotated Greek New Testament. One facet of OpenText.org's work isolates clause boundaries. Within each clause, subjects, predicators, complements and adjuncts are identified. This enables searching of the Greek New Testament with sensitivity to clause-level criteria. This advance raises certain questions: How should syntactic annotation be used? What sorts of things can be searched for?

This paper examines different sorts of searches that can be pursued from the starting point of a word. Questions like "When is [word] used as a subject?" or "What verbs are used when [word] is a subject?" will be examined and discussed.

SBL 2006: Sunday Afternoon, Nov. 19; Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics session in room 204C-CC, from 4:00-6:30. My paper is the second paper and starts around 4:10. The format of the session is four 10-minute papers followed by 30 minutes of informal discussion. So drop by and see me, and do ask me questions.

Word Groups, Head Terms and Modifiers in the Pastoral Epistles: Insight for Questions of Style?

The OpenText.org group have completed a preliminary syntactic analysis of the Greek New Testament. One level of their analysis is the Word Group level. A word group is a group of words that consists of, at minimum, a head term. It also contains any terms that modify the head term and additionally specifies the type of modification as that of definer, qualifier, relator or specifier.

Heretofore, stylistic analysis has been largely bound to tracking criteria such as word usage and morphology along with perhaps sentence length. The OpenText.org Word Group analysis allows for stylistic analysis of the corpus at a different level. Does modifier usage offer any insight for comparative studies of the Pastoral Epistles and the generally accepted Paulines? This paper will examine modifier usage data for both the epistles traditionally attributed to Paul and will offer preliminary comparisons between the results where results may offer insight for questions of style.

More SBL 2006: There are two additional meetings that I will be involved with.

Saturday, Nov. 18; 4:00-6:30 PM. AM18-107 (p. 246 in SBL program book). Logos Bible Software Syntactically Tagged Databases of the Hebrew Bible: Overview and Training Seminar. See program book for more details.

Monday, Nov. 20; 4:00-6:30 PM. AM20-101 (p. 256 in SBL program book). Logos Bible Software Syntactically-Tagged Databases of the Greek New Testament: Overview and Training Seminar. See program book for more details.

I will of course be much more involved with the Greek session on Monday than the Hebrew session on Saturday. But come to either/both; we'd love to see you there and talk about syntax!

Update (2006-09-18): In the comments, Paul asks if I'll make the papers available to the general public. Thanks for asking, Paul. The answer is "Yes!". This will likely be before the conference. Also note that for the SBL session, anyway, the paper will be much longer than 10 minutes will allow so my presentation there will actually be a summary. The ETS paper will be less of a summary, but since I can't bring myself to simply read pages, the paper there will reflect the content but be more appropriately presented (using a projector, powerpoint and perhaps even screen-captured video where necessary).