The Velveteen Rabbit, Opening, sentence 143
Why couldn't they stop and talk to me?"
Who acts: strangers · What happens: not stop, talk · To what, where: me
This is a sentence of «The Velveteen Rabbit» by Margery Williams Bianco, Opening. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (strangers), 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 | Why | why | ADV | PronType=Int | 5 stop | advmod |
| 2 | could | could | AUX | VerbForm=Fin | 5 stop | aux |
| 3 | n't | not | PART | Polarity=Neg | 5 stop | advmod |
| 4 | they | they | PRON | Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs | 5 stop | nsubj |
| 5 | stop | stop | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | root | root |
| 6 | and | and | CCONJ | _ | 7 talk | cc |
| 7 | talk | talk | VERB | VerbForm=Inf | 5 stop | conj |
| 8 | to | to | ADP | _ | 9 me | case |
| 9 | me | I | PRON | Case=Acc Number=Sing Person=1 PronType=Prs | 7 talk | obl |
| 10 | ? | ? | PUNCT | _ | 5 stop | punct |
| 11 | " | " | PUNCT | _ | 5 stop | punct |
Pragmatics
| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | not stop | could | strangers = stranger | vn stop-55.4-1-1 «NP.eventuality V»: agent=Eventuality | |||||
| 2 | talk | infinitive | strangers = stranger not said here | me | vn talk-37.5 «NP V PP.co-agent»: agent=Agent to i=Co-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.
Text: «The Velveteen Rabbit» by Margery Williams Bianco, Project Gutenberg book 11757 (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/pg11757/1/143/