How to search on Taalportaal

To search on Taalportaal, use the search box which appears on the top right of each page. Searching on Taalportaal works very much like searching on Google.

Simple search

For a simple search, type in one or more descriptive terms for what you're looking for. For example nominal, if you're looking for topics dealing with nominals, or noun verb adjective, if you're looking for topics about nouns, verbs or adjectives.

If you're looking for a particular phrase, you need to put double quotes around the phrase such as "nominal inflection", which will find topics containing the exact phrase nominal inflection.

Don't worry about capitalization. A search for Adjectives is the same as a search for adjectives.

Advanced search Wildcard searches

Taalportaal supports single and multiple character wildcard searches.

Wildcard Search Type	Special Character	Example
Single character (matches a single character)	?	The search string te?t would match both test and text.
Multiple characters (matches zero or more sequential characters)	*	The wildcard search: clitic* would match clitic, clitics, and cliticization.

Note: Wildcards cannot be used in initial position. Thus it is not possible to search for terms ending in *al.

Searches with search fields

Search fields are words that can be added to searches to help narrow down the results. To specify a field, type the field name followed by a colon : and then the term you are searching for within the field.

Field	How to use it
author:	Find topics written by a certain author. See people page for a list of Taalportaal authors. Examples: author:Geert
category:	Find topics belonging to a certain category (morphology, phonology, syntax). Example: category:Morphology
examples:	Find topics with example sentences containing a certain word. Example: examples:leeuw, examples:lion
keywords	Find topics containing a certain keyword. Example: keywords:syllable
language:	Find topics about Afrikaans, Dutch or Frisian. Example: language:Dutch
lingterms:	Find topics containing a certain linguistic term (as defined in the glossary). Example: lingterms:consonant
text:	Find topics containing a certain text. This is the default field. Example: text:"the ellipted noun"
title:	Find topics with a certain term in the title. Example: title:ellipsis

Note: The field is only valid for the term that it directly precedes, so the query title:word stress will find only word in the title field. It will find stress in the default field (in this case the text field). To force the title to contain the exact phrase word stress, use double quotes as in: title:"word stress".

Searches with boolean operators

Boolean operators allow you to apply Boolean logic to queries, requiring the presence or absence of specific terms or conditions in fields in order to match topics.

The boolean operator OR

The OR operator is the default conjunction operator. This means that if there is no Boolean operator between two terms, the OR operator is used. The OR operator links two terms and finds a matching topic if either of the terms exist in a topic.

adjective OR noun gives the same result as adjective noun, i.e. all topics in which either term (or both terms) exist.

The boolean operator +

The + symbol requires that the term after the + symbol exists somewhere in a field in at least one topic in order for the query to return a match.

For example, to search for topics that must contain nominal and that may or may not contain inflection, use the following query:

+nominal inflection

To search for topics that must contain both nominal and inflection, use

+nominal +inflection

The boolean operator -

The - symbol or "prohibit" operator excludes topics that contain the term after the - symbol.

For example, to search for topics that contain inflection but not derivation use the following query:

inflection -derivation

Grouping clauses with a field

To apply two or more Boolean operators to a single field in a search, group the Boolean clauses within parentheses. For example, the query below searches for a title field that contains both the word inflection and the word derivation:

title:(+inflection +derivation)