The Arabian Nights Entertainments, Opening, part 2, sentence 57

The merchant told the old man why he was obliged to come there.

Who acts: merchant · What happens: tell, oblige, come · To what, where: old man, merchant · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «The Arabian Nights Entertainments» by Andrew Lang, Opening, part 2. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (merchant), 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	The	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	2 merchant	det
2	merchant	merchant	NOUN	Number=Sing	3 told	nsubj
3	told	tell	VERB	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	root	root
4	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	6 man	det
5	old	old	ADJ	Degree=Pos	6 man	amod
6	man	man	NOUN	Number=Sing	3 told	iobj
7	why	why	ADV	PronType=Int	10 obliged	advmod
8	he	he	PRON	Case=Nom Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	10 obliged	nsubj
9	was	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	10 obliged	aux:pass
10	obliged	oblige	VERB	Tense=Past VerbForm=Part Voice=Pass	3 told	ccomp
11	to	to	PART	_	12 come	mark
12	come	come	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	10 obliged	xcomp
13	there	there	ADV	PronType=Dem	12 come	advmod
14	.	.	PUNCT	_	3 told	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	where	roles by
1	tell speech: assert	past	the merchant		the old man		vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP what S»: agent=Agent man=Recipient clause=Topic
2	oblige	past · passive		merchant			vn compel-59.1-1 «NP V NP S_INF»: subject=Patient clause=Result
3	come	to-infinitive				there	vn escape-51.1-1 «NP V»: agent=Theme

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/pg128/2/57/