The Arabian Nights Entertainments, Opening, part 1, sentence 11

Nobody knows how old they are, or who told them first.

Who acts: Nobody, women · What happens: know, be, tell · To what, where: women · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «The Arabian Nights Entertainments» by Andrew Lang, Opening, part 1. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Nobody, women), 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	Nobody	nobody	PRON	Number=Sing PronType=Neg	2 knows	nsubj
2	knows	know	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	root	root
3	how	how	ADV	PronType=Int	4 old	advmod
4	old	old	ADJ	Degree=Pos	6 are	xcomp
5	they	they	PRON	Case=Nom Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	6 are	nsubj
6	are	be	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Plur Person=3 Tense=Pres VerbForm=Fin	2 knows	ccomp
7	,	,	PUNCT	_	10 told	punct
8	or	or	CCONJ	_	10 told	cc
9	who	who	PRON	PronType=Rel	10 told	nsubj
10	told	tell	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	2 knows	parataxis
11	them	they	PRON	Case=Acc Number=Plur Person=3 PronType=Prs	10 told	iobj
12	first	first	ADV	NumForm=Word NumType=Ord	10 told	advmod
13	.	.	PUNCT	_	2 knows	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	to whom	other	roles by
1	know	present	Nobody			vn comprehend-87.2-1-1-1 «NP V S_ING»: agent=Experiencer clause=Stimulus
2	does	present	women = woman		old property	vn exist-47.1 «NP V»: agent=Theme
3	tell speech: assert	past		women = woman	first property	vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent they=Recipient

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 Arabian Nights Entertainments» by Andrew Lang, Project Gutenberg book 128 (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/pg128/1/11/