Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter IV. The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill, sentence 52

Then came a little pattering of feet on the stairs.

Who acts: little pattering · What happens: come · To what, where: stairs

This is a sentence of «Alice's Adventures in Wonderland» by Lewis Carroll, Chapter IV. The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (little pattering), 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	Then	then	ADV	PronType=Dem	2 came	advmod
2	came	come	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	a	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	5 pattering	det
4	little	little	ADJ	Degree=Pos	5 pattering	amod
5	pattering	pattering	NOUN	Number=Sing	2 came	nsubj
6	of	of	ADP	_	7 feet	case
7	feet	foot	NOUN	Number=Plur	5 pattering	nmod
8	on	on	ADP	_	10 stairs	case
9	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	10 stairs	det
10	stairs	stair	NOUN	Number=Plur	2 came	obl
11	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 came	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	when	other	roles by
1	come	past	a little pattering of feet			the stairs	then		vn appear-48.1.1 «NP V PP.location»: agent=Theme on stair=Location

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.

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