Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter III. A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale, sentence 33

“Why,” said the Dodo, “the best way to explain it is to do it.”

Who acts: Dodo, best way · What happens: say, explain, be · To what, where: way · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «Alice's Adventures in Wonderland» by Lewis Carroll, Chapter III. A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Dodo, best way), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

Parsed by Mova, not checked by a teacher. This tree is Mova's own parse (the en model, on the CPU, when the site is built); it may be wrong.

The tree

The words, one row each (CoNLL-U)

#	word	lemma	UPOS	features	head	relation
1	“	"	PUNCT	_	5 said	punct
2	Why	why	ADV	PronType=Int	5 said	advmod
3	,	,	PUNCT	_	2 Why	punct
4	”	"	PUNCT	_	2 Why	punct
5	said	say	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
6	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	7 Dodo	det
7	Dodo	Dodo	PROPN	Number=Sing	5 said	nsubj
8	,	,	PUNCT	_	18 do	punct
9	“	"	PUNCT	_	18 do	punct
10	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	12 way	det
11	best	good	ADJ	Degree=Sup	12 way	amod
12	way	way	NOUN	Number=Sing	18 do	nsubj
13	to	to	PART	_	14 explain	mark
14	explain	explain	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	12 way	acl
15	it	it	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	14 explain	obj
16	is	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	18 do	cop
17	to	to	PART	_	18 do	mark
18	do	do	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	5 said	ccomp
19	it	it	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Neut Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	18 do	obj
20	.	.	PUNCT	_	18 do	punct
21	”	"	PUNCT	_	18 do	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	other	roles by
1	say speech: assert	past	the Dodo			vn say-37.7-1-1 «NP V that S»: agent=Agent clause=Topic
2	explain speech: assert in a quote	to-infinitive	the best way not said here	way		vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Agent it=Topic
3	is in a quote	present	the best way		do property	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.

Text: «Alice's Adventures in Wonderland» by Lewis Carroll, Project Gutenberg book 11 (public domain in the USA). Tree: Mova's own parse, Elamur Cosmic License. Frames: Mova's frames reader (prag), the chapter read in order.

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg11/4/33/