Fifty Famous Stories Retold, The Black Douglas., sentence 6

Nothing could frighten an English lad more than to tell him that the Black Douglas was not far away.

Who acts: Nothing, Black Douglas · What happens: frighten, tell, not be · To what, where: English lad, war · Speech: someone speaks here

This is a sentence of «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, The Black Douglas.. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (Nothing, Black Douglas), 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	Nothing	nothing	PRON	Number=Sing PronType=Neg	3 frighten	nsubj
2	could	could	AUX	VerbForm=Fin	3 frighten	aux
3	frighten	frighten	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	root	root
4	an	a	DET	Definite=Ind PronType=Art	6 lad	det
5	English	English	ADJ	Degree=Pos	6 lad	amod
6	lad	lad	NOUN	Number=Sing	3 frighten	obj
7	more	more	ADV	Degree=Cmp	3 frighten	advmod
8	than	than	ADP	_	7 more	fixed
9	to	to	PART	_	10 tell	mark
10	tell	tell	VERB	VerbForm=Inf	3 frighten	advcl
11	him	he	PRON	Case=Acc Gender=Masc Number=Sing Person=3 PronType=Prs	10 tell	iobj
12	that	that	SCONJ	_	19 away	mark
13	the	the	DET	Definite=Def PronType=Art	15 Douglas	det
14	Black	Black	PROPN	Number=Sing	15 Douglas	compound
15	Douglas	Douglas	PROPN	Number=Sing	19 away	nsubj
16	was	be	AUX	Mood=Ind Number=Sing Person=3 Tense=Past VerbForm=Fin	19 away	cop
17	not	not	PART	Polarity=Neg	19 away	advmod
18	far	far	ADV	Degree=Pos	19 away	advmod
19	away	away	ADV	_	10 tell	advcl
20	.	.	PUNCT	_	3 frighten	punct

Pragmatics

#	verb	tense, mood	who	what, whom	to whom	other	roles by
1	frighten	could	Nothing	a English lad			vn amuse-31.1 «NP V NP»: agent=Stimulus lad=Experiencer
2	tell speech: assert	to-infinitive	Nothing not said here		war		vn transfer_mesg-37.1.1-1-1 «NP V NP.recipient»: agent=Agent he=Recipient
3	not is	past	the Black Douglas			away, far 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: «Fifty Famous Stories Retold» by James Baldwin, Project Gutenberg book 18442 (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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