Alice's word games: puns, parodies and nonsense, sentence 15

The Hatter's riddle «Why is a raven like a writing-desk?» has no answer; Carroll admitted it, though later he and his readers invented answers for fun.

Who acts: riddle, Carroll, Hatter · What happens: be, have, admit, invent, riddle · To what, where: raven, answer, answers · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of the lesson «Alice's word games: puns, parodies and nonsense» 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 (riddle, Carroll, Hatter), 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	2 Hatter	det
2	Hatter	Hatter	PROPN	Number=Sing	4 riddle	nmod:poss
3	's	's	PART	_	2 Hatter	case
4	riddle	riddle	NOUN	Number=Sing	17 has	nsubj
5	«	«	PUNCT	_	9 raven	punct
6	Why	why	ADV	PronType=Int	9 raven	advmod
7	is	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	9 raven	cop
8	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	9 raven	det
9	raven	raven	NOUN	Number=Sing	4 riddle	appos
10	like	like	ADP	_	14 desk	case
11	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	14 desk	det
12	writing	writing	NOUN	Number=Sing	14 desk	compound
13	-	-	PUNCT	_	12 writing	punct
14	desk	desk	NOUN	Number=Sing	9 raven	nmod
15	?	?	PUNCT	_	9 raven	punct
16	»	»	PUNCT	_	4 riddle	punct
17	has	have	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
18	no	no	DET	PronType=Neg	19 answer	det
19	answer	answer	NOUN	Number=Sing	17 has	obj
20	;	;	PUNCT	_	22 admitted	punct
21	Carroll	Carroll	PROPN	Number=Sing	22 admitted	nsubj
22	admitted	admit	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	17 has	parataxis
23	it	it	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	22 admitted	obj
24	,	,	PUNCT	_	31 invented	punct
25	though	though	SCONJ	_	31 invented	mark
26	later	late	ADV	Degree=Cmp	31 invented	advmod
27	he	he	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	31 invented	nsubj
28	and	and	CCONJ	_	30 readers	cc
29	his	his	PRON	Case=Gen Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 Poss=Yes PronType=Prs	30 readers	nmod:poss
30	readers	reader	NOUN	Number=Plur	27 he	conj
31	invented	invent	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	22 admitted	advcl
32	answers	answer	NOUN	Number=Plur	31 invented	obj
33	for	for	ADP	_	34 fun	case
34	fun	fun	NOUN	Number=Sing	32 answers	nmod
35	.	.	PUNCT	_	17 has	punct

Pragmatics

No stored speech act for this sentence.

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	other	roles by
1	is a in a quote	present		a raven	like a writing desk	tree rules
2	have	present	the Hatter's riddle	no answer		vn birth-28.2-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent answer=Patient
3	admit speech: other	past	Carroll	answer		vn admit-64.3-1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent it=Theme
4	invent	past	Carroll	answers	for fun; late property	vn create-26.4-1 «NP V NP PP.beneficiary»: agent=Agent answer=Result for fun=Beneficiary
5	riddle		the Hatter			nom riddle «communication intransitive»: poss=agent

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:041-alice-s-word-games-puns-parodies-and-nonsense.lesson:15.

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, R7-rel-agree ×1, 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/language/41-alice-s-word-games-puns-parodies-and-nonsense/15/