Verb Phrasings in Relationships

English Query

English Query

Verb Phrasings in Relationships

When a relationship between two entities can be expressed by an action word or verb, use verb phrasing to describe it (for example, salespeople sell teachers briefcases from the warehouse).

When specifying a phrasing, English Query provides the passive equivalent of the phrase. For example, specifying the verb phrasing Salespeople sell customers products also allows users to ask the passive question "Which products were sold to customers by which salespeople?".

In general, use active voice, rather than passive voice, in verb phrasings. For example, instead of creating the phrasing products are sold to customers by salespeople, create the phrasing salespeople sell customers products. By creating the phrasing in the active voice, you enable English Query to understand questions in both the active and passive voices. For example, it could answer both Who sold John a lawnmower? (active voice) and What was sold to John by Fred? (passive voice).

Converting a Passive Voice Phrasing to an Active Voice Phrasing

Whenever a phrasing that has prepositional phrases is missing a subject, a direct object, or an indirect object, check to see whether any of the objects of the prepositions can be used to restate the phrase in the active voice. For example, in the phrasing Cars are driven by people, cars is the direct object, are driven is the verb, and people is the object of a preposition. This phrasing works better as People drive cars, and it can be converted by making people the subject. Similarly, Customers give money to salespeople can be converted to Customers give salespeople money.

Note  Pay close attention to prepositional phrases using the prepositions by and to. Frequently, the objects of these prepositions can be changed into subjects and indirect objects, respectively.

Using Multiple Instances of an Entity

In some cases, another instance of an entity is needed to create the desired phrasing (for example, persons migrate from countries to countries). In this case, two instances of the countries entity are needed. The join condition determines your choice about which instance of the countries entity goes with each preposition. For the first instance, the join condition is migration.from_cid~country.id. For the second instance, the join condition is migration.to_cid~country.id.

See Also

Defining Relationship Phrasings

Expanding an English Query Model

Verb Phrasing Dialog Box