Just So Stories (Rudyard Kipling), 5: The Elephant's Child, part 1 (What does the Crocodile have for dinner?), sentence 23

The "Precession of the Equinoxes" is a real, very slow wobble of the Earth that takes about 26,000 years, so saying something happened "in the middle of" it one morning is Kipling's joke.

Who acts: Precession, real slow wobble, something, saying · What happens: be, take, say, happen · To what, where: real slow wobble, middle, joke · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of the lesson «Just So Stories (Rudyard Kipling), 5: The Elephant's Child, part 1 (What does the Crocodile have for dinner?)» of the books course of Mova's primary school. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Precession, real slow wobble, something, saying), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

The tree

The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)

#	word	lemma	UPOS	features	head	relation
1	The	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	3 Precession	det
2	"	"	PUNCT	_	3 Precession	punct
3	Precession	precession	PROPN	Number=Sing	14 wobble	nsubj
4	of	of	ADP	_	6 Equinoxes	case
5	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	6 Equinoxes	det
6	Equinoxes	equinox	PROPN	Number=Plur	3 Precession	nmod
7	"	"	PUNCT	_	3 Precession	punct
8	is	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	14 wobble	cop
9	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	14 wobble	det
10	real	real	ADJ	Degree=Pos	14 wobble	amod
11	,	,	PUNCT	_	10 real	punct
12	very	very	ADV	_	13 slow	advmod
13	slow	slow	ADJ	Degree=Pos	14 wobble	amod
14	wobble	wobble	NOUN	Number=Sing	40 joke	parataxis
15	of	of	ADP	_	17 Earth	case
16	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	17 Earth	det
17	Earth	Earth	PROPN	Number=Sing	14 wobble	nmod
18	that	that	PRON	PronType=Rel	19 takes	nsubj
19	takes	take	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	14 wobble	acl:relcl
20	about	about	ADV	_	21 26,000	advmod
21	26,000	26,000	NUM	NumForm=Digit NumType=Card	22 years	nummod
22	years	year	NOUN	Number=Plur	19 takes	obj
23	,	,	PUNCT	_	25 saying	punct
24	so	so	ADV	_	25 saying	advmod
25	saying	say	VERB	Tense=Pres VerbForm=Part	40 joke	csubj
26	something	something	PRON	Number=Sing PronType=Ind	27 happened	nsubj
27	happened	happen	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	25 saying	ccomp
28	"	"	PUNCT	_	31 middle	punct
29	in	in	ADP	_	31 middle	case
30	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	31 middle	det
31	middle	middle	NOUN	Number=Sing	27 happened	obl
32	of	of	ADP	_	34 it	case
33	"	"	PUNCT	_	34 it	punct
34	it	it	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	31 middle	nmod
35	one	one	NUM	NumForm=Word NumType=Card	36 morning	nummod
36	morning	morning	NOUN	Number=Sing	27 happened	obl:unmarked
37	is	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	40 joke	cop
38	Kipling	Kipling	PROPN	Number=Sing	40 joke	nmod:poss
39	's	's	PART	_	38 Kipling	case
40	joke	joke	NOUN	Number=Sing	root	root
41	.	.	PUNCT	_	14 wobble	punct

Pragmatics

No stored speech act for this sentence.

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	is a	present	the Precession of the Equinoxes	a real slow wobble			of the Earth	tree rules
2	take	present	a real slow wobble			year		vn bring-11.3 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent
3	say speech: assert	gerund						vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic
4	happen	past	something		the middle of Precession	morning		vn occur-48.3-1 «NP V PP»: agent=Theme in middle=Location
5	is a	present	saying	Kipling's joke				tree rules

One row per clause the reader finds. «not said here»: a role filled from the clause above. «roles by»: a VerbNet class and frame when one fits the verb, else the reader's rules on the tree.

Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0, as the whole of Mova corpus 0.4, of which this treebank (the agreed school, mova-school-agreed-en.conllu) is part. The lessons were written for Mova's primary school. Sentence school:books:079-justso-elephants-child-1.lesson:23.

The tree: Mova annot: Rust (en) → Haiku 5.5 (medium, Batches API) patches; gates UD 2.18; agreed by treeagree rules (Stanza, Trankit, spaCy trf): R5-strong ×1, R6-punct-agree ×2, R8-pos-agree ×4. The frames are read from the tree by Mova's frames reader (prag) when this page is built, the lesson read in order, so a pronoun may be resolved from an earlier sentence.

See the release 0.4.

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/79-justso-elephants-child-1/23/