Chapter 4 - The Semantics of pistis christou

Extracting Treebank Data

class Chapter_4.treebank_extract.extractDependencies(target, orig, relation='sub', form='lemma')[source]

Extracts specified syntactic relationships from PROIEL-formatted dependency treebank data. At this point, each specific relationship uses a different function, e.g., get_objects retrieves all of the tokens for which the target token is the head.

Parameters:
  • target (str) – The target word that is being analyzed.
  • orig (str) – The full path to the XML file containing the treebank information
  • relation (str) – The code for the syntactic relationship that the target word should share with the other word (e.g., “sub”)
  • form (str) – Whether to use the dictionary form of the target word (“lemma”) or its inflected form (“form”)

The only new task introduced in chapter 4 is the extraction of syntactic dependency data from dependency treebank data. The use of this code is fairly straightforward. The target parameter is simply the unicode string that represents the word whose sytnactic relationships are to be analyzed. The treebank parameter is the complete file path to the XML file in which the treebank data can be found. The relation parameter is the code used in the treebank data to represent syntactic relationship one hopes to find, e.g., “sub” for subject or “obl” for oblique. And, finally, the form parameter sets whether to search on the dictionary form of the word, in which case form="lemma" (the default) or the inflected form of the word, in case form="form". So, to find all of the occurrences of the word πίστις (pistis) in the New Testament in which πίστις has a genitive object, you would type in the following code:

from Chapter_4.treebank_extract import extractDependencies
pipe = extractDependencies(target="πίστις", orig="proiel-treebank/greek-nt.xml", relation="atr", form="lemma")
pipe.get_genitive_deps()
print(pipe.dependents[:10])

It should be pointed out that the code as it appears here depends on the PROIEL XML treebank format. I chose to follow the PROIEL format simply because treebank data for almost the entire New Testament is available in this format. However, the code is written in a way that should allow the user to replace any linguistic codes or XML attributes with those of their chosen treebank format.

Such analysis of syntactic relationships was an integral part of this chapter since much of the scholarly argumentation about the phrase pistis christou concerns the syntactic relationship of the two words within it and, more specifically, whether this relationship is a subjective genitive, i.e., that Christ is the one who believes, or an objective genitive, in which Christ is the one who is believed (in). The extraction of the location of all applicable phrases within (a part of) the New Testament was done using the get_genitive_deps function. But, unlike other syntactic analyses that have been published, I then used the semantic similarity of the noun pistis with its associated verb pisteuo (to believe, trust) to further delve into the meaning of “belief” in the Pauline epistles and in the New Testament in general by using the get_objects function to group the different types of objects with which pisteuo appears (e.g., accusative object, dative object/oblique, or with a prepositional object) to discover how each of these different object types is used by the New Testament authors. After painstaking interpretation of all of these different relationships, it became clear that belief for Paul consisted both in a belief in the story of Christ’s resurrection and a trust that God would also resurrect those who were faithful to God as Christ had been. While this very brief summary cannot serve as evidence of the claims that I make, it does serve to show why I chose to bring syntactic data to bear in this chapter and how this syntactic data helped me to arrive at my conclusions.

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