Slang and how it changes with every generation, sentence 10
"The bee's knees" and "the cat's pyjamas" meant something excellent in 1920s American slang; they were playful nonsense.
Who acts: knees · What happens: mean, be · To what, where: something, playful nonsense
This is a sentence of the lesson «Slang and how it changes with every generation» of the language 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 (knees), 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 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 5 knees | punct |
| 2 | The | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 3 bee | det |
| 3 | bee | bee | NOUN | Number=Sing | 5 knees | nmod:poss |
| 4 | 's | 's | PART | _ | 3 bee | case |
| 5 | knees | knee | NOUN | Number=Plur | 14 meant | nsubj |
| 6 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 5 knees | punct |
| 7 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 12 pyjamas | cc |
| 8 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 12 pyjamas | punct |
| 9 | the | the | DET | Definite=Def PronType=Art | 10 cat | det |
| 10 | cat | cat | NOUN | Number=Sing | 12 pyjamas | nmod:poss |
| 11 | 's | 's | PART | _ | 10 cat | case |
| 12 | pyjamas | pyjama | NOUN | Number=Plur | 5 knees | conj |
| 13 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 12 pyjamas | punct |
| 14 | meant | mean | VERB | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | root | root |
| 15 | something | something | PRON | Number=Sing PronType=Ind | 14 meant | obj |
| 16 | excellent | excellent | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 15 something | amod |
| 17 | in | in | ADP | _ | 18 1920s | case |
| 18 | 1920s | 1920s | NOUN | Number=Ptan NumForm=Combi NumType=Card | 14 meant | obl |
| 19 | American | American | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 20 slang | amod |
| 20 | slang | slang | NOUN | Number=Sing | 15 something | appos |
| 21 | ; | ; | PUNCT | _ | 25 nonsense | punct |
| 22 | they | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 25 nonsense | nsubj |
| 23 | were | be | AUX | Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin | 25 nonsense | cop |
| 24 | playful | playful | ADJ | Degree=Pos | 25 nonsense | amod |
| 25 | nonsense | nonsense | NOUN | Number=Sing | 14 meant | parataxis |
| 26 | . | . | PUNCT | _ | 14 meant | punct |
Pragmatics
- form
- statement
- act
- assert
- voice
- narrator
- polarity
- none
- teacher
- kept the draft
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | mean | past | the bee's knees and the cat's pyjamas | something | in 1920s | vn representation-110.1 «NP V NP PP.attribute»: agent=Pivot something=Theme in 1920s=Attribute | |||
| 2 | is a | past | knees = knee | playful nonsense | 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:language:017-slang-and-how-it-changes-with-every-generation.lesson:10.
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): R1-cc-next ×1. 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/language/17-slang-and-how-it-changes-with-every-generation/10/